This introductory course prepares you for advanced coursework and teaches the basic concepts to effectively lead public service programs in the governmental, nonprofit, and private sectors. You will become acquainted with public administration and policy as fields of study, and learn how to recognize, explain, and contrast foundational public administration concepts and issues.

You will explore public administration within political, legal, and social contexts to understand the three broad challenges you will face in your career as a public manager: administrative rationality in a democratic republic, organizational capacity and networks, and institutional opportunities and constraints. You will also gain practical knowledge through case studies and interviews with leading D.C. practitioners in the public, nonprofit, and advocacy sectors.

This course was developed by Senior Professional Lecturer and Director of Online Programs Dr. Sonja Walti. Walti is an international scholar in public policy who has served in consulting, advisory, and decision-making roles at various levels of government in the U.S. and abroad, including the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Italian Agnelli Foundation, and the Quebec Commission on Fiscal Imbalance. Her research on comparative public policy and public administration, policy analysis, comparative federalism, and environmental policy has been published in several major journals.

Course objectives:

• Receive an introduction to public administration and policy and set the stage for advanced learning
• Develop beginning skills for public policy analysis and analytic writing
• Recognize, explain, and contrast foundational concepts in public administration
• Explain and effectively communicate the range of issues that can occur in public administration
• Identify causes of success and failure in governance and public administration
• Diagnose problems and devise solutions for practical problems in public administration

The course covers the following topics:

• The challenges of governing/organization matters
• The political and cultural context impacting public policy and administration
• The structure of the machinery of government
• Operators, managers, and executives
• Public financial management
• Reform trends that have led to collaboration, networks, and public-private governance arrangements
• Federalism and intergovernmental relations
• Analysis, implementation, and change

Legal Issues in Public Administration explores the legal framework for contemporary public administration in the United States. You will master how to manage public sector organizations in a constitutional and legal manner and understand when to consult an attorney before taking legal action. You will also learn the principles of federal constitutional and administrative law that govern public administrators’ decisions, activities, and operations.

This course will explain how and why legal requirements must be integrated into general administrative processes, practices, and systems. In the process, you will gain non-technical constitutional competence, which is welcomed by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and required by the federal courts. Although the course deals with public management and U.S. law, many of the issues discussed are also pertinent to other political and administrative systems as well as to nonprofit management.

This course was created by distinguished Professor of Public Administration David Rosenbloom, a National Academy of Public Administration Fellow, a current member of the editorial boards of about 20 academic journals, and the winner of several awards for excellence in teaching and scholarship. Rosenbloom served on the Clinton-Gore Presidential Transition Team for the Office of Personnel Management in 1992.

Rosenbloom was cited by Supreme Court Justices as an authority on the first amendment rights of federal employees in Elrod vs. Burns (1976) and Branti vs. Finkl (1980). His book Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector was ranked the fifth most influential book published in public administration from 1990 to 2010.

Course objectives:

• Critically reflect on assigned legal cases such as Sherbert vs. Verner and Goldberg vs. Kelly
• Apply the First and Fourth Amendments, due process, and equal protection rights to administrative problems
• Learn to manage the administrative law requirements for rulemaking, adjudication, and transparency as applicable to work-related situations
• Examine the significance of a real-world case by playing the role of a media reporter or blogger reporting on it through your choice of delivery format (video, article, etc.)

The course will cover the following main subject areas:

• Become aware that what you don’t know can hurt your agency financially
• The courts and public administration: structuring the Fourth Amendment right to privacy
• What is equal protection of the law?
• Freedom of speech and religious freedom
• Procedural due process, the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, outsourcing the Constitution to contractors and collaborators
• Dealing with 18th-century constitutional designs for federalism and the separation of powers in contemporary America
• Judicial review of administrative action and inaction

In this course, you will learn the basics of “speaking truth to power,” an eight-step approach to policy analysis that is professionally rigorous and politically relevant. Study how to translate good policy analysis into better policy by deeply understanding policy problems, carefully formulating solutions, and strategically engaging in dialogue with key decision-makers.

Through selected readings, lectures, discussions, and hands-on assignments, you will assimilate this approach and tailor it to your purposes. You will gain an appreciation for the difficulties of designing policy interventions that can survive not only mistaken assumptions about cause and effect but also flawed implementation processes.

Dr. Karen Baehler, a Scholar in Residence at American University, developed this course. Baehler has extensive experience in policy analysis that has included more than a decade of work for government agencies and think tanks in the Washington DC area, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Maryland Department of Human Resources, and the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies. She has published three books, 12 refereed journal articles, and three book chapters on policy-analysis topics.

Course objectives:

• Demonstrate mastery of the eight steps of policy analysis, including theories and methods associated with each
• Demonstrate ingenuity in solving problems, openness to competing perspectives, skepticism toward conventional wisdom, political awareness, and care for people affected by policies
• Learn to write policy memos and provide oral policy recommendations
• Record a short video response to a case study and provide feedback to other student videos
• Craft policy advice that is professionally rigorous and relevant and articulates your vision of good policy analysis and its role in the policy process.

The course covers the following topics:

• Speaking truth to power by relying on evidence to make a case for change
• Verifying and detailing problems
• Building an outcomes matrix to assess solutions while thinking outside the box
• Moving from outcomes matrix to recommendations
• Testing policy options using logic models as well as common sense
• Learning from master policy analysts
• Applying policy evaluation and politics

In this course, you will explore the relationship between economics and public policy and learn the concepts necessary to become an informed consumer of microeconomic-based policy analysis. You will develop an understanding of resource scarcity, opportunity cost, supply and demand, consumer and producer surplus, market equilibrium, competitive markets, economic efficiency, market failure, efficiency equity, and cost-benefit principles.

This course will also show you how to apply the basic principles of modern microeconomic theory to practical public policy problems and decisions. You will discover how to avoid unintended consequences of policy interventions by thinking critically about the resulting incentives and how individuals are likely to respond to them. These skills will help you recognize all relevant costs and benefits to avoid common pitfalls in decision-making.

This course was developed by Professor Seth Gershenson, who has been honored with the Emerging Education Scholar Award sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Gershenson’s approach to teaching and scholarship applies economic approaches to practical, policy-driven questions in policy areas such as education, including studying teacher behavior in response to financial incentives. He has completed grant work for the American Educational Research Association, the Spencer Foundation, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute.

Course objectives:

• Learn to think like an economist to make sound decisions and avoid negative consequences
• Design sound policy using principles of behavioral economics
• Predict how consumers are likely to respond to incentives using marginal cost analysis
• Use principles of game theory to describe and analyze how players make strategic decisions in competitive environments

The course will cover the following main subject areas:

• How to think like an economist
• Supply, demand, and elasticities
• Externalities and property rights
• Public goods and information
• Perfectly competitive markets and profit maximization
• Regulating monopolies
• Behavioral economics

This course examines the importance of governmental budgeting and explains the federal budget processes for the executive and legislative branches. It will familiarize you with the role of the federal budget in national economic policy and explore how governments use taxes and other means to acquire and dispense resources. You will consider the relationships between budgeting and financial management, public policy, and politics. The course examines the different processes at the enterprise level (entire nation or entire state), agency level, and program level. While this course emphasizes budgeting and financial management in the federal government, it also includes numerous examples from the state and local levels of government and related to the nonprofit sector.

This course was developed by Albert C. Hyde, an Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at American University. He is the author or editor of numerous public administration textbooks, including an extensively revised 10th edition in July 2022 of Introducing Public Administration. Hyde was a senior staff member and consultant at the Brookings Institution from 1997 to 2009. Before starting his academic career, he was a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. State Department and a senior associate with the New York State Legislative Commission on Expenditure Review.

Course objectives:

• Understand federal budget processes for the executive and legislative branches
• Analyze technical budget articles and explain budgeting concepts
• Define various types of government revenue and spending and the factors driving that revenue and spending
• Compare and contrast government deficits and federal and state debt
• Critically examine political budget proposals and determine their probable financial impact

Topics covered in this course include:

• Budgeting terms
• Mandatory vs. discretionary spending
• Federal debt and debt limit
• Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the president’s budget documents
• Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis
• Tax expenditures, balanced budgets, unfunded mandates, and trust funds
• Capital budget writing and reviewing
• Budget justifications
• Budget execution and the alignment of budgeting, politics, and public policy

As a future leader in public affairs, whether as a public manager or a policy analyst, you will need to understand statistics. This course provides those foundations. You will learn how to think about and describe populations and samples, make inferences about populations from samples, and use samples to make predictions about population patterns. Policy professionals will explain how you can process and apply this knowledge. You will also gain hands-on experience using statistical software to work with large datasets, a skill that directly enhances your resume. By the end of the course, you will have a quantitative research project that you can use as a writing sample for interested employers.

Those who understand patterns and trends by means of quantitative data can make better policies and manage programs effectively. In your career, you will likely need to conduct or interpret quantitative analysis of data. You will also need to understand quantitative studies that may influence your decision-making. This course prepares you for both of these essential tasks.

This course was developed by Anna Amirkhanyan, Professor and Chair of DPAP American University.

Course objectives:

• Understand how to use quantitative data as a tool for solving problems and conducting analysis
• Learn from policy professionals who explain the process and application of this knowledge
• Understand basic statistical principles so you can evaluate the quantitative analysis conducted by others
• Review and understand a variety of quantitative studies that may influence decision-making at your workplace
• Run basic statistical procedures with SPSS, a software program for statistical analysis and graphical presentation of data

Course topics covered include:

• Introduction to statistics and data visualization
• Descriptive statistics: Measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion
• The normal curve and sampling distributions
• Inferential statistics: Confidence intervals
• Hypothesis testing
• Measures of association: Bivariate measures, correlations, scatterplots, and regression analysis

While significant resources are used to evaluate policies and programs, not all evaluations successfully determine whether a policy or program works. This course will teach you how to distinguish high-quality from low-quality evaluations so you can critically consume evaluation studies. You will learn how to conduct and design evaluations and employ tools that measure whether programs and policies have achieved their objectives.

This course introduces you to a variety of research designs and related methodological tools useful for evaluating the need for a program or policy, its implementation, and its impact on key outcomes. You will learn how organizational, programmatic, and political factors can influence evaluation. The class examines policies and programs in a broad range of areas, including health, criminal justice, education, welfare and poverty.

This course was developed by Associate Professor Alison Jacknowitz, who also serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Department of Public Administration and Policy. Jacknowitz has won awards from American University for Outstanding Teaching in a Full-Time Appointment and Innovative Use of Technology in Teaching. Her research on issues related to poverty, the elderly, children and families have been funded by several major governmental and academic institutions, including Feeding America, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The class will require and reinforce a basic understanding of regression analysis. You will apply concepts taught in PUAD 660: Quantitative Methods.

In this course, students will:

• Learn to critique the validity of evaluation studies
• Write evaluation questions and corresponding hypotheses
• Develop a research design to answer an impact evaluation question
• Create a data collection plan, including questionnaire development
• Recognize how organizational, programmatic, and political factors can influence evaluation

Topics covered include:

• Overview of program evaluation
• Data and regression analysis for program evaluation
• Validity
• Evaluation of program theory and logic models
• Randomized field experiments
• Quasi-experiments
• Non-experiments and process evaluation
• Survey methods

Many daily challenges managers face originate from a need to coordinate and control organizational and individual action to meet program goals and broader social objectives. To address these challenges, public and nonprofit managers must understand the unique institutional context of public organizations and the behavior of individuals within them.

In this course, you will examine several theories that seek to explain the actions of organizations (organizational theory) and the behavior of individuals within organizations (organizational behavior). You will explore relevant research in public administration and bridge theory and practice in ways that will help you approach and successfully address complex management problems. You will accomplish this by studying relevant cases, submitting a paper describing the development of a hypothetical mini-survey, and completing a group paper and presentation of organizational analysis. Along the way, you will get a chance to gain insights into specific organizations and meet relevant practitioners.

The developer of this course is Assistant Professor Khaldoun AbouAssi. AbouAssi holds a Ph.D. in public administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and served as an assistant professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M before joining American University. He has extensive practical experience, having worked for more than 12 years in public and nonprofit organizations in the Middle East. AbouAssi serves in leadership positions at the American Society of Public Administration and the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action.

Course Objectives

• Explore relevant research in public administration
• Bridge theory and practice to approach and successfully address complex management problems
• Acquire the knowledge and abilities necessary to think critically about organizational action and the behavior of individuals within organizations
• Learn tools and strategies for understanding, interpreting, and responding to the internal and external contexts of public organizations

Topics covered include:

• Foundations
• Public-private distinctions
• Organizational structure, design, and technology
• Politics, stakeholders, and bureaucracy
• Decision making
• Organizational goals and effectiveness
• Work motivation and employee values
• Workforce diversity
• Communication, conflict, and negotiation
• Group behavior and teams
• Leadership and organizational innovation and change

This course provides the necessary foundation to perform human resource management responsibilities in the public sector. It will trace the history of the human resource function in the public sector and provide an understanding of the legal context in which human resource managers function, including constitutional protections and equal employment opportunity frameworks. You will learn and apply the skills associated with the primary functions of a human resource department through exercises and case studies. The course also develops your understanding of the legal, political, and practical issues facing public personnel managers.

The format and assignments for this class are designed to build the skills you need as an HR professional. Your assignments will test your abilities to conduct independent research and analysis and to clearly and concisely present your findings in various formats.

This course was developed by Dr. Vicky Wilkins, Interim Provost and previously the Dean of the School of Public Affairs Department of Public Administration and Policy. Prior to that, she served as an administrative leader at the University of Georgia. Wilkins has received six awards for outstanding teaching. Her research on human resource management, representative bureaucracy, bureaucratic discretion, gender and race issues, deservingness, and political institutions has been published in numerous leading public administration and policy studies journals. She is a member of the editorial board of three major journals in public administration.

Course Objectives

• Gain an understanding of the legal context within which human resource managers in the public sector function
• Apply the skills associated with the primary functions of a human resource department
• Distinguish between HR practices in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors
• Demonstrate knowledge of the core functions of human resource management by applying knowledge to specific examples and cases
• Critique human resource systems used by various public organizations and recommend (or not) adoption of that practice by a chosen agency

Topics covered include:

• Human capital in the public sector (history and reform)
• Constitutional protections
• HR planning
• Classification and compensation
• Recruitment and selection
• Training
• Motivation, performance, and discipline
• Survey methods used to assess human capital

Leadership is not just about having a plan or about having the answers. It’s far more complex. This course teaches you how to let go of the ingrained perceptions of leadership and problem-solving that limit the mind’s ability to see and solve. You will discover and expand your leadership style through individual and collective learning.

In this class, you will explore various leadership models and their strengths and weaknesses and learn to think critically about leadership based on real-world cases. You will learn how to connect leadership concepts and behaviors to other ideas, people, and realms of life. This course also includes exercises that raise issues about the practicality of your leadership style. This exploration of how your perspective shapes your view and enactment of leadership will help you develop your distinctive leadership approach.

This course on leadership was developed by Dr. Ruth Zaplin, Executive-in-Residence at our School of Public Affairs and the Director of International Programs in our Key Executive Leadership Programs. Zaplin served as a senior advisor and project director with the National Academy of Public Administration in Washington, DC, and founded the Academy’s Global Leadership Consortium. As a Senior Manager at BearingPoint, she led enterprise-wide transformation plans, large-scale government reform, workforce restructuring, and work redesign initiatives in both the public and private sectors.

Course Objectives

• Understand and recognize various approaches and theoretical bases of leadership
• Identify the unique challenges of leading public sector organizations
• Analyze and understand your authenticity along with your preferred approaches to leadership
• Recognize and discuss real-life experiences that will provide opportunities to deal with a variety of leadership problems
• Identify, research, and interview an executive leader in the public sector regarding their leadership philosophy, style, and practice. Write a report with a detailed overview of the leader that ties in course literature.

Topics covered include:

• What is leadership?
• Diagnosis of the leadership self
• Traits of leaders and approaches to leadershi
• The style approach to leadership
• The situational approach to leadership
• The contingency theory of leadership
• The path-goal theory of leadership
• Lead-member exchange theory
• Women and leadership
• Leadership and the art of the question
• Organizational culture and leadership

“Performance” and “results” are two words used to describe what we expect from public management. Successful project completion makes an important contribution to both. A set of disciplines known as the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) aims to improve rates of successful project completion, but its success is unproven.

In this course, you will draw on academic and professional literature as well as case studies to critically examine the project management disciplines and their potential contribution to performance, particularly in the public sector and nonprofit settings. Class readings will identify good practice norms in project management, which you will test against the realities of actual projects, many of which failed. You will scrutinize standards for judging success and consider methods for explaining project outcomes. This course encourages you to challenge existing theories and approaches to help you build a distinctive understanding of project management.

Upon completion of the course, students are qualified to apply for certification as a Certified Associate in Project Management, awarded by the Project Management Institute (PMI). To qualify for the certificate, students need to pass the PMI’s three-hour examination, which contains 150 multiple-choice questions.

This course was developed by Dr. Karen Baehler, who is Scholar in Residence at the School of Public Affairs. Baehler has extensive experience in policy analysis that has included more than a decade of work for government agencies and think tanks in the Washington DC area, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Maryland Department of Human Resources, and the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies. She has published three books, 12 refereed journal articles, and three book chapters on policy-analysis topics.

Course Objectives

• Learn how to apply project management analytical concepts
• Acquire vocabulary, concepts, and tools of project management
• Acquire deep knowledge of one project and the reasons for its failures and successes
• Advance your critical thinking, argumentation, and writing skills
• Form habits of good practice by applying selected PM methods to a specific project
• Build habits of engagement, teamwork skills, and presentation skills

Topics covered include:

• Public management’s perennial problems: Does project management offer solutions?
• The project plan
• Risk, contingency planning, and high reliability
• Measuring, testing, and reporting progress
• Structure, culture, and teams

This capstone course is the “culminating skills” component of the MPAP degree program. You will put to practice the material from the MPAP curriculum to demonstrate your preparedness to work professionally in the field of public administration and policy. The practicum gives you the opportunity to complete a real-world assignment on behalf of an external client; typically a government agency or a nonprofit organization selected from among the School of Public Affairs partnering organizations.

To complete the assignment over the course of the semester, you will be asked to work in small project teams using virtual collaboration and meeting tools. During that time, you will meet with your client organization on several occasions, including receiving your assignment, clarifying its scope, discussing intermediate deliverables, and finally, presenting your work. Throughout this experience, you will have an opportunity to observe other clients and teams and network with partnering organizations.

Senior Professional Lecturer and Director of Online Programs Dr. Sonja Walti is the developer of this course. Walti is an international scholar in public policy who has served in consulting, advisory, and decision-making roles at various levels of government in the U.S. and abroad, including the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Italian Agnelli Foundation, and the Quebec Commission on Fiscal Imbalance. Her research on comparative public policy and public administration, policy analysis, comparative federalism, and environmental policy has been published in several leading journals.

Course Objectives

• Accomplish a significant applied policy or administrative analysis project on behalf of an external client
• Assess mastery of MPAP curriculum content in application to examples of professional policy analysis or management, and identify opportunities for improvement
• Share insights and experiences and develop a joint learning environment inside and outside the classroom
• Learn from and closely interact with practitioners
• Improve understanding of how the MPAP curriculum fits immediate and longer-term career objectives

Topics covered include:

• Curriculum recap
• Team formation
• Kickoff meeting with the client
• Development of a statement of work
• Scoping of work and development of a work plan
• Completion of research and deliverable(s)
• Presentation of deliverable(s)
• Critical appraisal of project process and outcome