Understanding Public Sphere and Attitudes towards Public Services: Perceptions from Selected Rural Philippine and Thai Residents
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Abstract
This is an exploratory study that aims to contribute to the understanding of the public sphere in the context of democracy and active citizenship and to apply the concept in public administration and governance. The New Public Sphere model serves as theoretical guide for the community-centeredness ideal of public agencies and the concomitant significance of active citizenship. Habermas’s theory of communicative action also serves to buttress the study’s theoretical underpinning within the deliberative democracy continuum. The study points the enhancement of public services as its development goal, thereby exploring how the complex concept of public sphere and its novel application in public administration field may be examined further. Public sphere in this study is therefore initially regarded as a means to an end (i.e. how knowledge on the sphere may be used for the improvement of public services) and the psychological conditions on the part of the rural respondents in which it thrives are made to surface. The results and analysis are mostly descriptive, extracting from perceptions of respondents from rural geographical and political adjacent locations in Thailand and the Philippines.
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