Professor Peter Hupe on waiving speeding tickets — and authoritarianism

A police officer pulls over a speeding driver. The driver explains the reason they were driving so fast is because of a serious medical emergency. Hearing this, the officer makes a discretionary decision. The decision is not to issue a speeding ticket.

The law on speeding is unambiguous, and police officers are supposed to enforce the law. On this occasion, it seems, the police officer has not done their job properly.

This is however not the view taken by Professor Peter Hupe, a Visiting Fellow at Oriel College who is currently writing a new book on street-level policy implementation while working from Oxford University’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

Professionals in public service such as police officers, Hupe says, have the freedom to exercise discretion in adapting written laws and policies to the real world. Those formal texts get their final substance and form in real-world scenarios involving real people. The nature of the scenarios, Hupe argues, can legitimately influence the shape the enforcement of law and the implementation of policy takes, such as in the case of the driver giving a compelling reason for speeding.

Hupe studied Political Science at VU Amsterdam and later wrote a doctoral dissertation on policy formation at Leiden University. At Erasmus University Rotterdam he taught and studied the politics of the state in action for 31 years.

A semi-retired scholar in public administration, Hupe is now a visiting professor at the Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven. Early in his career and before his doctorate, he worked in the Dutch national civil service, where for a time he was the head of a policy advisory unit. There, he says, he discovered the “relevance of policy implementation.”

Generally the study of government focuses on the legislative process, legal documents and public policies. But Hupe believes it is also necessary to observe and understand the behaviours and decisions of the public servants responsible for enforcing laws and implementing policies, in relation to those whom the laws and policies concern, such as teachers with their pupils and medical practitioners with their patients.

“I’m trying to say,” Hupe says, “you should … of course study the documents very seriously, go into the files and the dossiers of the topics you are interested in. But next to that you should leave the desk, go into the world [and] have interviews with and observe the people who are supposed to implement those texts.”

Because of the many discretions exercised by professionals in public service, what is realised on the ground, through the implementation of policy, is often not the same outcome as official policy would dictate. “In a way there are two worlds,” Hupe says, the world of written policy and then the world as it really is.

But maybe, this isn’t such a terrible thing, Hupe suggests. The idea of total command and control from government through the rigorous enforcement of law and policy has the signature of authoritarianism, Hupe says.

At the same time, it is “a fiction,” he adds — “I am convinced of that.” The two worlds can never be brought into complete alignment, since it is impossible to control everything from the centre.

“What you want,” Hupe argues, “is a kind of relative autonomy of professionalism in public service, making sure that there are people still thinking, institutions still working [and] functioning as a kind of counterweight to power vis-à-vis the authoritarian wish to command and control.”

“More and more I’m thinking of the usefulness of this two worlds phenomenon,” he adds. “Because the one world can function as a check on the other world.”