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23PRAXIS OF INCREASING PUBLIC TRUST TOWARD BUREAUCRACIES: IN SEARCH OF COMPETITIVE PRACTICES OF STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS OFARMENIA
Robert Khachatryan Introduction
The 21st century may very well become known as the century of globalization. The surge and process of globalization, the "spirit of the time" for democracy (Diamond 2008b), the escalating importance of ideologies and the pursuit to construct, safeguard and sustain democracy, and a sense of group identities (including national identity, cultural identity, political identity, educational identity, among the most significant ones) elucidate much of what is going on in the world nowadays. Furthermore, a changed understanding of the relations between the state and society demands extensive streamlining in the practices of democracy and bureaucracy in the 21st century. This is more expounded in terms that the last century has witnessed arduous efforts of world polities to sustain drastic transitions and shifts in their systems of government. This is particularly relevant about post-Soviet countries, where there has been a new wave of democratization since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Both democratic and bureaucratic practices entail public trust, for it is a fundamental value for any democratic polity or political system. However, lower levels of public trust or distrust towards the government comprise negative effects on the effectiveness of the implementation of public policies, including education policies. These constructs diminish the significance of shifts in complex bureaucratic practices in the Republic of Armenia from the rigid Soviet practices to the ones of a democratic polity. The overarching objective of this article is to reveal the relationship between
* PhD, Head of Quality Assurance Center, Head of Chair on Education Management and Planning, Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences.
lower levels of public trust or distrust towards the government and perceived failure to deliver a wide range of public policies in the Armenian context, including education policy. This has been exacerbated by the reality that the processes of policy development in Armenia have become increasingly inaccessible to citizens and stakeholders. Thus, these processes have created explicit consequences in citizens' perceptions on transparency, accountability and visibility of public policy making in Armenia. The impenetrability and distanced processes of public policy-making and consequent decision-making processes in Armenia, combined with the lack or extreme weakness of mechanisms to ensure transparency, accountability and visibility of education policy making, have significantly contributed to angst about the competitiveness of higher education system in Armenia and efficient stakeholder engagement practices in higher education. This is expounded by the fact that higher education traditionally has been a national responsibility, the consequence of which is that the concepts of transparency, accountability and visibility have usually been interpreted in particular national contexts (Burke 2005; Trow 1996).
Participatory models of stakeholder engagement in the works of education bureaucracies might ensure that bureaucracy promotes and supports democracy. Accordingly, the level of trust among citizenry toward bureaucracies will increase, bringing a shift in citizens' and stakeholders' attitude that that the government serves their needs, they can affect decision-making, and that government is able to deliver. The purpose of this research is to theoretically contribute to the advancement of body of literature and the concepts of the relationship between public trust and effective bureaucratic practices in the field of education in Armenia.
As it has already been mentioned, the 21st century is characterized by several global trends, which mostly determine the geopolitical picture of the world. One of the main trends has been the process of establishment of new independent and democratic countries. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, insurmountable serious problems fell onto the Caucasian countries: transition from totalitarian regime to democracy, transition from the socialist economic system to free market economy, development of competitive education systems, among others. The South Caucasus constitutes a regional formation with its own characteristics. The Caucasus region has become the site for some of the most serious inter- and intra-state con-
flicts. The political elites of the newly independent states have been well aware that their security could not be considered apart from each other. This awareness of the regional dimension of the security problem has not led, however, to the creation of a unitary institutional framework for the Caucasus favoring conflict settlement and regional cooperation. Armenia is no exception to this general pattern.
The significance of this theoretical discussion is both timely and practical for two foremost reasons. First, there has been a growing and meaningful body of research and literature that focuses on trust in mature democracies on the part of sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and economists (Baier 1986, Gambetta 1990, Coleman 1998 and 1990, Fukuyama 1995, Seligman 1997, Hardin 1998, Braithwarte and Levi 1998, Warren 1999, Inglehart 1999, Uslaner 2002). Further on, government and non-government organizations have been conducting surveys and collecting data to measure levels of trust in mature democracies and obtain reliable and trustworthy data on democratic innovations. These include the World Economic Forum, Global Barometer Surveys (GBS), the Eurobarometer, the Asia Barometer, Participedia, Transparency's Corruption Perception Index, and Swedish Social Science Data Service (SSDS), among others. Despite trust has caused a great deal of scholarly debate about both its definition and its measurement in the contexts of mature democracies, a dearth of systematic and comprehensive research, relevant literature and empirical data on public trust is available for the context of post-Soviet Countries, especially for the countries in the region of South Caucasus. Accordingly, the topic of public trust in the Armenian context remains an underin-vestigated area of research both in theory and measurement.
Second, in the globalizing world, for emerging democracies that are at the stage of economic and social transitions, it is vital to adjust through localizing some of the best practices and mechanisms of governance that have been effectively and efficiently implemented in mature democracies and economies. In this context, this research will contribute to the body of literature on the topic of different dimensions of public trust as it is manifested in bureaucratic practices in education. This discussion is driven by theoretical propositions and grounded in examples or approaches of accountability in the higher education system in Armenia, which may set up the ground for exploring a model of relationship between decreasing public trust towards bureaucracies in Armenia.
With the emergence of the New Public Management Doctrine and managerial-ism, new accountability schemes were legitimized (Bovens 2006: 7), whereas, the previous accountability schemes, such as the one in which citizens held the politicians accountable through electoral processes, became not practical and viable. This is specifically expounded for accountability is about finding a good balance between conflicting demands and expectations and that higher education institutions should "serve all while submitting to none of these imperatives" (Burke 2005: 23). To this end, accountability schemes continuously develop throughout the world and this expansion of accountability measures characterizes perhaps the most dominant trend that is creating the new hybridization and complexity. Stensaker and Harvey (2011: 19) suggest that "developing accountability schemes often contain both hard and soft elements, they combine internal and external needs, the distinction between national and international elements is blurring and there is an increase in the number and types of stakeholders interested in holding higher education accountable."
One of many available classifications of accountability is worth discussing in this article that might visualize the above-mentioned trend. Vidovich and Slee (2001) identify four different forms of accountability: upward, downward, inward, and outward. By upward accountability, Vidovich and Slee denote any forms of accountability that take the form of a principal-agent relationship including bureaucratic, legal and procedural means. Downward accountability includes the responsibilities of the principal towards the agent, which, translated into higher education, could imply a number of collegial mechanisms. Inward accountability relates more to how individuals, professionals or disciplines adhere to ethical or professional standards, while outward accountability implies how institutions respond to markets, users and clients in higher education, including the political arena.
Nevertheless, the extent and scope of accountability as a "lubricant of relations" geared towards the increasing the legitimacy of (and trust in) higher education should be further researched. One potential consequence of current developments with respect to accountability is that there is an "emergent 'market' for accountability. With numerous providers of accountability, and increasing complex ways and methods to demonstrate accountability, the question is what consequences this might have for higher education. If institutions, countries or states 'buy into' the accountability scheme that suits their interest best, the results need not to
be increased legitimacy, at least not if the benchmarks are more global" (Stensaker and Harvey 2011: 20).
Trow (1996: 232) distinguishes between two central dimensions of accountability. First, Trow suggests the first dimension between external and internal accountability, where the first notion relates to the obligation of universities and colleges towards their supporters and funders, and the second relates to the extent of which different constituents or parts of the institution are performing, the scope and the level of commitment of staff towards the vision and mission, and how units and staff are committed to improve the quality of their activities. The second dimension is between 'legal/financial' and 'academic' accountability, where the first notion relates to the obligation institutions posses, for example, to report on how resources have been spent and whether institutions are acting in accordance with the rule of law. The second notion relates to the obligation the institutions to inform about teaching and learning activities. Nevertheless, any form of accountability takes the form of a principal-agent relationship including bureaucratic, legal and procedural means. The distortion of this classification is manifested in the evident blurring between legal/financial and academic forms of accountability. This might be illustrated by evidence of the new systems and schemes for internal quality assurance that higher education institutions are often externally obliged to establish in Armenia. In such systems, legal requirements concerning stakeholder participation; the need to conduct certain kinds of evaluations and assessments contributes to undermining the traditional boundaries between more administrative and more professional accountability.
Bureaucracy and Its Significance in a Democracy
From an array of theories that contemplate foundational pillars of the interplay between the practices of bureaucracy and democracy, this article pursues the objective of choosing the most appropriate theory - the Weberian legacy of hierarchical order. According to Merton (2007: 97), in many respects, the classical analysis of bureaucracy is that by Max Weber. Weber put forth the rationale of modern bureaucracies and described the bureaucratic form as being the ideal way of organizing government agencies (systematically bringing knowledge to systematically bearing on public problems). Subsequently, bureaucracy is a hierarchical structure for organi-
42
zation designed to perform a particular set of tasks. Max Weber was the first to conceptualize bureaucracy in its modern structure and its potential significance for large-scale organizations, which also encompass public institutions. Max Weber's classic theory of bureaucracy serves a focal basis for the discussion of organizational accountability in higher education, because it is the theoretical base of most contemporary education management theories.
The term bureaucracy is multidimensional. The bureaucratic theory encompasses the "analysis of public administration by making distinctions between either political and administrative acts or actions and/or by making distinctions between political and administrative actors" (Frederickson and Smith 2003: 16). Accordingly, the concept of bureaucracy encompasses a range of primarily administrative ideas and premises. A bureaucracy is a group of individuals hired as civil servants on the basis of merit and charged with "distributing the outputs of public policies" (Wilkins 2007: 78) and serving the public. Within the framework of this article, the concept of bureaucracy is primarily defined as "administrative body of appointed officials" (Albrow 1970: 42). Additionally, the concept of bureaucracy refers to the administrative body of street-level bureaucrats, defined by Michael Lipsky, as "public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have substantial discretion in the execution of their work" (Lipsky 1980: 3). This distinction is vital because "street-level bureaucrats are neither elected nor appointed by elected officials, they are largely immune to electoral accountability. To the extent that elected officials cannot fully control street-level bureaucrats' day-to-day decisions and actions, citizens have few mechanisms for assessing, much less controlling their impact on policy" (Meyers and Nielsen 2012, 311). Thus, this dichotomy is further exacerbated in Armenia because civic oversight and assessment of bureaucracies and consequent bureaucratic practices in the process of "distributing the outputs of public policies" is weak or in some cases non-existent. However, in the case of education bureaucracies from local school systems to state authorities of education, as well as state higher education institutions are designed to be accountable to various groups, including both internal and external stakeholders.
The most fundamental components for bureaucracy are broadly categorized as structure, knowledge, and power. The structure, including hierarchy, is the required and ongoing feature of any organization or society, made up of various social
groups that embed different values and interests. Bureaucrats, considered as a group or hierarchy, must first develop an underpinning of experiential knowledge before that group of hierarchy, known as bureaucracy, can accumulate power. The New Public Management Doctrine may illustrate the knowledge component of bureaucracy, including professional expertise. This doctrine "represents an approach in public administration that employs knowledge and experiences acquired in business management and other disciplines to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and general performance of public services in modern bureaucracies" (Vigoda-Gadot 2009: 18). Accumulating professional expertise is one construct, yet gaining power is another one. Bureaucracy embeds an inherent tendency to accumulate power, which includes managing administrative discretion. The crux of Weber's classification is the legitimacy of authority. Weber describes this as an ideal-type construct, considering it to be a rational and efficient form of organization, once bureaucrats accumulate sufficient administrative discretion. In a mature democratic polity, the authority of bureaucracy is traced to the law - this is why Weber referred to a legal-rational ideal type. Bureaucracy is the embodiment of the legal-rational source of authority that Weber posited in contrast to tradition and charisma.
According to Weber, bureaucracy is derived from legal authority. Rules are the basis for the decisions and means to efficiently accomplish organizational goals. Weber argued that power was the "ability to direct other's behavior, regardless of whether those being directed believed it was proper and acceptable" (Weber 1954). Thus, the legal authorization of individuals to behave in a certain manner is a crucial dimension under legal authority and derives its powers from the system of bureaucracy and the system of democracy. This is promulgated in emerging democracies, in which the nexus between bureaucratic power and the rule of law is not established as strong as it is in mature democracies. Additionally, Weber also placed boundaries on bureaucracy. He was not only worried about the danger of internal bureaucratic inefficiency or mismanagement, but rather the inherent tendency of a bureaucracy to accumulate power. In other words, elected officials come to realize how dependent they are on the expertise of bureaucrats, who exercise the power in emerging democracies, such as Armenia.
The bureaucratic form of administration has become so commonplace that there is a general assumption that the normal way of organizing almost any en-
deavor is bureaucratic. Alvin Gouldner contends that the "ideal type of bureaucracy" might serve a base for determining the design a formal organization is bu-reaucratized. It is worth mentioning that some organizations will be more bureau-cratically structured than others with one major condition that a given organization might be more bureaucratized on several characteristics and less on others. Nevertheless, the common trend is that bureaucracy has become a hallmark of modern democratic polities. However, the capacity of those bureaucratic procedures is subjective, depending largely on how the public's interests are affected by such procedures. Meier and O'Toole succinctly recapitulate that "bureaucracies are hierarchical institutions that can provide the capacity and expertise to accomplish complex social tasks, but they are frequently characterized as undemocratic and even threatening to democracy. Democracies are systems of government that are based, directly and indirectly, on the principle of popular control" (Meier and O'Toole 2006: 2). This contention is explained by the existence of inherent tensions between values associated with democracy: equality, participation, and individuality, and values associated with bureaucracy: hierarchy, specialization, and impersonality (Thompson 1983). After all, the main potential of ideal bureaucratic procedures is to bring a balance among competing interests and needs of citizens.
Inherent Tension between Democracy and Bureaucracy
Public trust embeds in-depth assurance of or implicit confidence on expectations of the public towards the government without conclusive evidence. In this regard, this design necessitates that public trust is not in short supply. Trust is especially critical for new regimes, however, "in which it also is likely to be in short supply" (Mishler and Rose 2001: 30). This is fundamentally true because new regimes, whose predecessors including most post-Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, proved unworthy of trust (Dogan and Higley 1998). The general pattern is that the public tends to express a great deal of dissatisfaction in public administration, in the result of which public trust continues to deteriorate. The situation in Armenia is not an exception. Therefore, a conceptual discussion of public trust and a critical examination of literature on the constructs of trust and stakeholder engagement offers practical benefits since it is imperative to understand why trust towards the practice of bureaucracy shrinks and what can be a useful an-
tidote for the Armenian context. This antidote might be constructive for those engaged in designing governance arrangements in Armenia and beyond.
At the outset, there is an immense fissure between two major antithetical engines of change in a democratic polity: the concept of democracy and the power of bureaucracy. More specifically, Vigoda-Gadot states that democracy "relies on the broad, collective support of the people who hold power that can be delegated upward to leaders. In contrast, bureaucracy is based on the power of the few and on delegation downward to employees or other individuals who make up the majority in organizations (or around them)" (Vigoda-Gadot 2009: 45). This dichotomy is particularly evident in the contexts of both mature and emerging democracies. More specifically, the design of mature democracies incorporates bureaucratic accountability to elected bodies, whereas the design of emerging democracies incorporates the rule of law contrasts, i.e. bureaucracies employ their own source of power and little accountability to elected bodies. Thompson (2005: 50) further contends that "many of the values we associate with democracy - equality, participation and individuality - stand sharply opposed to the hierarchy, specialization, and impersonality we ascribe to modern bureaucracy." However, some mature democracies, including Western democracies, embrace the reconciliation of the paradox of a strong bureaucracy in a democracy. Not all polities concur, but some contend "both governments and citizens, as partners, are the essence and the target of the modernization and advancement of a prosperous democratic society" (Vigoda-Gadot 2009: xii). Along similar lines, Kaplan (2008) states that a "country's ability to advance is crucially tied to its citizens' ability to cooperate - both among themselves and in partnership with the state - in increasingly sophisticated ways." The bureaucratic-democratic paradox additionally incorporates intrinsic tension between citizens as clients and citizens as partners. Citizens as clients can be factored in the "unidirectional" process of the responsiveness to the people's needs and demands and responsiveness to a vague public will. Whereas, citizens as partners can be factored in the "bidirectional" process of effective collaboration between those of power and those who delegate power - authorities and state administrators, who "must see themselves as committed to citizens who have agreed to be led or 'governed' on condition that their lives continuously improve" (Vigoda 2002: 529). This fact also embeds the rising sentiment of consumerism in higher education, which is reflected in
the increasing demand of students to participate in the decision-making processes that impact both the quality and trajectories of their education.
Thus, the bureaucratic-democratic paradox is strongly intertwined and potentially reconciled with stakeholder engagement in the process of decision-making, both when this participation is at an individual level and when it is in an organized manner through social groups, interest groups, social movements, and other social platforms. In this article, the terms of citizenry or citizenship are used interchangeably and denote two concepts: a legal status and a practice.
Be that as it may, the generic tendency in current methods of governance is to pursue a reasonable compromise between evolving democracy and evolving bureaucracy. A "mechanism for reconciliation between the political order of democracies and the administrative order of bureaucracies must be constructed if citizens and leaders wish to build a stronger society" (Vigoda-Gadot 2009: 2). Though the last century had turned into an "age of democratic triumph" (Dahl 1998), it also produced a "democratic recession" (Diamond 2008a). Explorations of a compromise frequently produce dissatisfaction with both concepts and generate a democratic rollback in the bureaucratic state, which in turn produces a cynical citizenry. In the confines of this article, democratic rollback is used as the overarching concept that embraces different dimensions, such as democratic recession, democratic deficit, a crisis of power, a crisis of legitimacy, and a crisis of citizen alienation from governments, among others. In order to explicate the contention that democratic rollback is intertwined with public trust and bureaucracy, it is essential to understand that both "people (the citizens) and the leaders (the politicians and the senior bureaucrats) must obey the rules of the democratic game" (Vigoda-Gadot 2009: 67). The following section will provide a brief overview of what constitutes the "democratic game" within the context of emerging democracies, such as Armenia.
Constructs of Public Trust
Any democratic polity embeds a system for measuring how closely governmental policies match public preferences or needs. This interplay is known as democratic responsiveness, which in its turn is based on value system. Bureaucracy is a locus for democratic responsiveness. Both democratic and bureaucratic practices entail public trust for it is a fundamental value for any polity. Fukuyama (1995: 7) articulates this
fundamental value eloquently, a "nation's well-being, as well as it stability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in a society." Stemming from this contention, it may be inferred that trust is an amorphous and highly contextual construct. Due to this complexity of the meaning of the construct trust, both conceptually and by definition, it deems necessary to provide a brief discussion of its definitions. The construct trust denotes different meanings.
A multitude of researchers have identified more specific components that contribute to the construct of trust. The concept of trust has been further explored as a general social problem (Braithwaite and Levi 1998; Cook 2001; Sztompka 1998) and has been elaborated in scholarly literature, including sociology (Coleman 1990; Coleman, Brudney, and Kellough 1998), economics (Fukuyama 1995), organizational science (Gambetta 1990, Shaw 1997), and education (Tshannen-Moran and Hoy 1998). In this literature, there is an implied notion that trust is paramount to establishing and maintaining positive relationships, whether they are at the interpersonal, group (Barber 1983) or organizational levels (Likert 1967) in each of these respective fields of study. Generally, trust is associated with group stability and permanence in relations (Kale and Mclntyre 1991), performance (Zand 1972), productivity (Golembiewski and McConkie 1975), leadership styles (Likert 1967), organizational development (Golembiewski 1985), and even with "administrative evil" (Menzel 2001). Broadly defined, trust is considered to be a "willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectations that that party will perform an action of importance" (Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt and Camerer 1998). To this end, trust embodies a level of risk and consensual dependence from all parties involved. It may be inferred that trust denotes an element in a consensual relationship, in which there is equal risk and equal benefit of performing an "action of importance" as perceived by the parties involved.
These factors vary greatly according to the type of relationship at issue - that is, individual, group or organizational - and they change over the duration of the relationship. The most commonly used definition in the literature is that of Mishra (1996), who contemplates on trust from a multidimensional perspective and incorporates the components of competence, openness, benevolence, and reliability in the definition. Yet other researchers (Cummings and Bromily 1996) incorporate a
fifth dimension, honesty, in the construct of trust. Thus, these dimensions of the construct trust - competence, openness, benevolence, reliability, and honesty -have extensively been used in research to measure an individual's perception of a corresponding party's trustworthiness in their relations. Based on these definitions, trust could be defined as a sustained combination of communication acts with certain limited probabilities that gradually develop a system of shortcuts, optimizing the time of communication and the utility of end product. Efficient administration incorporates practices that make the communication efficient creating management modes of operation that would result in effectiveness of service delivery, which is correlated with increasing trust among citizenry.
Based on this discussion, trust embodies a substratum of a legitimate democratic system and is seen as "purposive, a lubricant of relations" (Berman 1997: 105) in the context of political system. Hetherington (2005: 9) defines political trust as the "degree to which people perceive that government is producing outcomes consistent with their expectations." In those social exchange relationships, people expect government or its representatives to be ethical and fair concerning citizen's rights and interests (Carnevale 1995). This is the overarching reason why the "ability of the state to provide effective public services tends to contribute to public trust and, ultimately, to public participation" (Peters 2010: 642). More specifically, the concept of trust in government is based on the "trustee's fiduciary responsibility to preserve and enhance the assets of the trust, keeping always in mind the good of the beneficiaries ...." (Brown 1994: 71). Correspondingly, citizens are entitled to have means to force corrective actions when government acts in an illegal, immoral or unjust manner. Thus, trust is institutionalized in a polity's practices and relations and there is direct correlation between trust and government performance perceived by citizens. Furthermore, "confidence in or satisfaction with the work of any institution is not simply a reflection of its record but depends on a relationship between expectations and performance. Hence, confidence could erode because expectations have increased even if performance has remained the same" (Bok 1997: 56). An array of citizens' expectations is wide-ranging, including performance (actual and perceived), government policy directions and alternatives (actual and contemplated), probity (public opinion on ethical issues), denunciation of government (the "advent of sweeping changes in media technology and practice), among others.
This relationship has been exacerbated because public trust has been declining. Hetherington (2005: 5) claims, "even if people support progressive policy goals, they do not support the policies themselves because they do not believe that the government is capable of bringing about desired outcomes." Thus, it may be stated that the public tends to express a "great deal of dissatisfaction in public administration" (Vigoda-Gadot 2009: 14). Citizens frequently denigrate politicians and bureaucrats, criticize the established institutions, and point out government failure and incompetence. This denigration and public dissatisfaction may ultimately harm democracy since public dissatisfaction "hampers governing in a constitutional structure that intentionally makes action difficult without strong popular approval... It hinders the task of recruiting and retaining capable public servants." (Orren 1997: 79). Hetherington (2005: 16) summarizes an array of factors on which public trust depends, such as policy satisfaction (Miller 1974, King 1997), economic evaluations and performance (Citrin and Green 1986, Kinder and Kieweit 1981), media negativity (Cappella and Jamieson 1997), war (Parker 1995), the president's personal characteristics (Citrin and Green 1986), and the size and scope of government (Masnbridge 1997)." Thus, the cause-effect relationship between all of these constructs creates this public dissatisfaction and in some cases, this public dissatisfaction can be defined as "cynicism."
Substratum of Continuum from Increasing Distrust to Cynicism
It may be overgeneralized that across both mature and emerging democracies there is a great deal of dissatisfaction in governments and in the public service delivery. Bureaucrats are most often blamed for the ugly side effects of management as they are "alleged in all quarters to be lazy, incompetent, devious, and even dangerous" (Goodsell 2004: 3). Elected officials and interest groups have also at some point blamed their problems on bureaucracy. The unethical behavior of elected officials lowers trust not only toward them, but also toward bureaucrats (Meier 2000: vii). Moreover, this is further complicated by the fact that elected officials often give "inconsistent, contradictory, and hence irreconcilable tasks" to bureaucracies, which complicates in turn the bureaucracies' success at operational level (Goodsell 2004: 59). Thus, this practice creates an overall situation when bureaucracies do assuage failures of elected officials. The latter process in its turn creates instability and
low permanence in relationships between citizens and bureaucrats, which is the main rationale behind the concept of public distrust both in mature and emerging democracies. This is specifically appropriate also for the case of Armenia, where democratic mechanisms of civic oversight and assessment are not yet fully engrained in all the bureaucratic practices and procedures.
The public is mainly unsatisfied about how the government serves its needs, and this dissatisfaction creates cynicism. Vigoda (2002:532) further explicates that cynicism toward government and bureaucracies is exacerbated by the fact that citizens are "remote from decision-making centers." Manifestations of public cynicism embody pervasive beliefs that government policies and public officials are incompetent or low performing (Johnson 1993). Thus, cynicism is seen as a "phenomenon that is linked to unsatisfied citizen needs... Cynicism and trust are deeply rooted in the management of government-citizen relations" (Berman 1997: 110). The upward trend of exploiting the term a "cynical polity" additionally indicates that to "misdefine cynicism as mistrust is to misgauge citizen attitudes about their politics" (Eisinger 2000: 59-60). Norris (2011: 1) makes a clear distinction between the ideas of "institutional confidence (a belief in the capacity of an agency to perform effectively), trust (a rational or affective belief in the benevolent motivation and performance capacity of another party), skepticism (suspended judgment), and cynicism (jaded negativity)." Based on this continuum, cynicism is more than mild distrust. Thus, a cynical polity might further impact on democratic rollback to a level where democracy can be undermined as a form of government in emerging democracies. There is no continuum in effective use that delineates the levels of public trust towards government and that explicates how each level of public trust creates pathologies or tangible circumstances for democratic rollback.
Consequently, the pathologies of democratic rollback lead to an idea that "bureaucracy tends to be inert" and produces "bureaupathologies," such as "dedication to the status quo, delay, fear of change, foot-dragging, imperviousness to suggestion, inability to learn, indecision, inflexibility, lack of imagination, obstruction, procrastination, rigidity, stagnation, stalling, and vested interests" (Caiden 1991:491). Additionally, Scott (1998) suggests four bureaupathologies - alienation of workers, overconformity in following rules, unresponsiveness to their publics, and relentlessness of organizational behavior. Prior to this array of malperformance
practices by Caiden, Pierce (1981) eloquently proposed comprehensive types of bureaucratic failures, which are particularly worth mentioning because they may be highly pertinent to emerging democracies. These bureaucratic failures are as follows: corruption (theft of materials, misuse of time on the job, bribery, misuse of office, conflicts of interest), misallocation of resources, technical inefficiency (waster, diseconomies, poor management, inappropriate investments, lack of innovation), ineffectiveness (useless activities, quiet ineffectuality, bad advice, egregious errors), subservience to clients, lack of coordination, conflicting objectives, spoils system, displacement of mandated objectives, favoritism, foot-dragging, arbitrariness, and inflexibility (Pierce 1981). There is a dearth of research on these bureaucratic failures and bureaupathologies in emerging democracies in the region of South Caucasus, including Armenia. Consequently, this setting of not empirically researched, and investigated situation or unawareness places the bureaucracy and bureaucratic practices of education in Armenia in a vulnerable position and resul-tantly creates harmful effects, oftentimes compromising the original mission and legitimacy of the bureaucracies in the eyes of the citizens. In light of this reality, it is instrumental that scholars and researchers empirically understand the causes of bureaucratic failures and bureaupathologies and attempt to obtain mechanisms and methods to mitigate excessively increasing distrust issues towards them.
These pathologies have also created democratic deficit in modern bureaucracies due to different factors. "Democracy and representative government are regarded as undermined if not sabotaged by bureaucracy" (Goodsell 2004: 14). However, it should be realized that the central problem is the organizing form of public policy making. The principle of hierarchy institutes an intolerable pattern of inequality, subordination, and dependence on the members of the organization. These patterns are contradictory to the concept of democracy. This is further complicated by the fact that the "specialization of work in bureaucracy creates narrow, humdrum routines that are nearly impossible to bear day after day" (Goodsell 2004:15). Ultimately, organizational designs evolve and consistently move towards instigating changes in organizational forms from the bureaucratic to the alternative paradigms of stakeholder engagement. Lack of realizing this circumstance compromises the effectiveness and perception of effectiveness of policy delivery, thus creating dis-
trust or cynicism towards the education system and/or education policies developed and implemented by the Armenian government.
In this regard, the concept of "democratic innovations" and participatory decision-making come forward as an alternative approach to a set of percepts that departs from the "traditional institutional architecture" of stakeholder's participation and include competitive practices such as merit-based selection of rectors, surveys and focus groups with stakeholders. This approach valuable because of two aspects of its design: on one hand, inclusive engagement of stakeholders of both "lay" or "non-partisan citizens" and experts and partisan campaigners; on the other hand, institutionalized forms of participation in political decision-making at strategic levels, such as "democratic devices that provide citizens with a formal role in policy, legislative or constitutional decision-making" (Smith 2009: 2). Goodsell (2004: 161) articulately suggests different models of stakeholder engagement as it will not only emerge "just in the abstract categories of volunteering, co-production, power sharing, advice, collaboration, or education, but [also] in concrete manifestations of all of these, in different mixtures and degrees." Thus, the archetype of a politically headed bureau should be transformed into a range of different corporate governance forms, such as multi-organizational collaboratives (Sullivan and Skelcher 2002), public-private partnerships (Skelcher 2005), quasi-governmental hybrids (Koppell 2003), and public interest companies (Prabhakar 2004). This transformation into new governance forms epitomizes the importance of fostering active citizenry in emerging democracies, as Armenia epitomizes and is geared towards increasing trust.
In this regard, trust is "achieved when institutions, over time, demonstrate accountability through the results and outcomes produced. The reputation a given university achieves will then become a proxy for trust" (Stensaker B. and Harvey L. 2011: 12). The mentioned process of building trust is narrowly interlinked with the concepts of stakeholders and stakeholder management come forward. Freeman (1984) suggests that a stakeholder may be any individual and group of individuals either impacted upon by the company or able to impact on the achievement of its objectives. Further on, Mitchell et al. (1997) set out a theory of stakeholder salience, in accordance with which stakeholders vary in terms of power, legitimacy, and urgency.
This system of stakeholder management is also noticeable in the system of higher education in Armenia, which includes both internal and external stake-
holders. More specifically, the institutions of higher education operate not only by integrating the directives and regulations stipulated by many external constituents, including state legislatures, boards of trustees, accrediting agencies, but also by functioning through a system of shared governance with input from internal stakeholders at the institutional level, such as teaching staff, staff and students, among the main groups of internal stakeholders.
Public Trust among Citizenry in Armenia
A limited corpus of empirical data might illustrate the discussion of public trust among citizenry in the context of Armenia. A private nonprofit research organization, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) describes the evolution of distrust based on the evidence using the World Values Survey and the Life in Transition Survey (LITS database) that is devoted to former socialist economies. According to that survey, distrust has increased in all transition countries." In the case of Armenia, there was an increase by 1.25 between distrust in 2006 and distrust before 1989. This situation has further exacerbated since 2006.
Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index 2013 indicates that 43% of the Armenian population think that corruption has increased in Armenia in the last two years and 82% of surveyed identified it a serious or very serious problem for the country. According to Transparency's Corruption Perception Index 2013, Armenia's has the index of 36 in terms of the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0 - 100, where 0 means that a country is perceived as highly corrupt and 100 means it is perceived as very clean. In a sample of 177 countries and territories, Armenia ranks at 94, sharing this rank in the Index with such countries as Algeria, Benin, Columbia, Djibouti, India, Philippines, and Suriname. Transparency's Corruption Perception Index shows the following picture in terms of most corrupt institutions in Armenia: the judiciary, public officials/civil servants, medical and health services are perceived as the most corrupt institutions, closely followed by the police, whereas NGOs and religious organizations are perceived to be the least corrupt. As justly stated by Transparency International Armenia, the "most alarming point here is that among the institutions perceived as the most corrupt are those, which themselves are by law entitled to fight against corruption." Probably conditioned by this, only 37% of respondents believe that ordinary people make
difference in the fight against corruption and 68% of respondents would not even report an incident of corruption, believing that it would not make a difference. This is also confirmed in the article Civic Trust and Governance in Armenia by Artak Shakaryan, who summarizes empirical data of the survey conducted in Armenia and asserts that the "lack of trust and honesty in Armenia is one of the main reasons for citizens' political apathy, as well as a perfect harbor for perpetuating corruption. The low level of trust in Armenia generates crises, which in turn can bring to a recession and overall decline of democratization" (Shakaryan 2007: 266).
First and foremost for the overarching objective of this article, it is important to present limited data on the attitude towards the system of education in Armenia. The importance of discussing briefly the attitude towards credible higher education institutions is pertinent because the autonomy and trust towards them is an important axis, which rules back to the instrumental notion of educated electors and civic oversight in a democratic polity. Effective and efficient higher education system will be valued "both for its 'intrinsic' qualities in creating, conserving and disseminating knowledge and for its 'extrinsic' qualities in serving broader economic, social and cultural goals. Responsibility for determining the system's 'academic agenda' is shared between institutions and external stakeholders" (Brown 2011: 4). Thus, efficiency and effectiveness of the services provided by higher education institutions derives their legitimacy from the support of all parties and stakeholders involved. However, as such, if a number of parties are unable or unwilling to participate in the process of decision making due to a lack of trust towards bureaucracies, this situation poses a significant and particular challenge to the functioning of the system of education as a whole.
In the Armenian context, bureaucracy is understood as a system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials (including civil servants) rather than by elected representatives. The above discussion emphasizes the notion that one of the failures of the system of state government in Armenia is exclusion of the public (citizens and stakeholders) from decision-making process. Much wider stakeholder engagement and civic participation in the bureaucratic practices in the Armenian system of education might be an antidote to increasing public distrust.
Nonetheless, enhancing stakeholder engagement can also place a significant burden on public authorities in Armenia. Smith (2009:19) posits, "engaging citizens has resource implications, both in terms of organizing engagement and the potential restructuring of administrative procedures and working practices to accommodate participation." But in general, the advantages of engaging diverse groups of stakeholders overweigh resource implications because novice modes in stakeholder engagement for the Armenian context may lead to optimal and/or maximum satisfaction of clients by the delivery scheme of bureaucracies, liberate bureaucrats from growingly ineffective measurement tools of public scrutiny that at times subvert the true mission of bureaucracy.
In attempting to map the available literature, research and empirical data on the subject matter, various factors and constructs have been overlapped and have emerged to schematize the field through the terrain. The subject of trust in Armenia is an underinvestigated area of research. This is exacerbated by the fact that the available literature on trust in post-Soviet countries (Mishler and Rose 2001) or mature democracies is rarely confined to one particular subject in an attempt to illustrate the overall picture. This contention has led to a task of formulating the construct of public trust that may stimulate stakeholder engagement in Armenia. A synthesis of various factors might be useful in determining the impact of trust on any bureaucracy and on the level of participation of the public in the decision-making and the governance process of education bureaucracies. Analyzing trust, including its dimensions, is expected to provide a productive means of assessing the relationship between these two groups and of measuring the impact these constructs may have on bureaucratic practices. It is still a contested space that has a multitude of questions and challenges that have yet to be embraced.
Conclusion
Taking into consideration the fact that the needs of society members and stakeholders continue to escalate and become more complex and without a countervailing measure of stakeholder engagement, it is likely that public distrust will further contribute to a democratic rollback and citizen cynicism and diminish complex bureaucratic practices. As modern society develops and citizens become more educated and sophisticated, bureaucracies are tasked to truly serve the ever-growing
needs and demands of citizens and remain faithful to their intended missions. Thus, it should be realized that trust is an asset, which should not be diminished. The overarching charge for relevant public policy makers or authorities in Armenia must be to generate discussion of new paradigms or modes of stakeholder engagement in order to ensure that bureaucracy promotes and supports democracy, as well as to devise advanced mechanisms to further institutionalize stakeholder engagement in the public decision making in the field of education in Armenia. The importance of stakeholder engagement will provide more space to elaborate on what actually happens when citizens do participate and engage actively and how these forms of participation blend with more traditional understanding of representative democracy and service delivery of public goods/services, including these operations at all levels of governance.
Bureaucracies are confronted with internal and external dynamics that complicates the efforts of those within and outside to maintain trust towards them. Lending credence to the inherent nature of bureaucracies to accumulate power, compromises among bureaucrats and elected officials are necessary to negotiate the interests and needs of the public. This is unequivocally embedded in the model of representative government, where "elected officials are supposed to hold views compatible with citizen predilections, thus ensuring that policy follows citizen desires. These elected executives appoint and supervise agency heads that adhere to popularly supported policy prescriptions" (Schachter 2012: 7). Thus, these sorts of compromises are critical for any democratic bureaucracy to function. Compromises embody both regime values and a certain measure of consistency and stability in order for actors to recognize and comprehend their legal obligations and rights as they accomplish the routine business of a society. The virtue of a democratic system that allows practices to evolve to keep pace with changing attitudes and a collective sense of equity is deeply rooted in the Western models of democracy and bureaucracy.
It has been argued throughout this article the experience of democratic decision-making and stakeholder engagement in Armenia does not percolate down to a shared understanding of bureaucracy and bureaucratic practices, and what these percepts actually imply in practice. A conflict which may potentially damage public trust is inherently embedded in the concept of serving a public with dissimilar values and objectives and with a lack of visions of how bureaucracies should function
and serve their controversial needs and interests. This conflict with its consequences is fueled by a mere fact that level of trust is a means of identifying success and failure of a democracy and bureaucracy from empirical data. Therefore, trust is an adequate indicator of the relationship between lower levels of public trust or distrust towards the government and perceived corruption or failure to deliver a wide range of public policies in the Armenian context.
December, 2016
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