The Good administration as a legal institution

Abstract

This study is a nowadays reflection on the principle of “good administration”. It differs from the concept of “good governance”, which has a high political component, to the extent that “good administration “ is set around a legal content, which must be filled out (and it has been laboriously) by the case-law and Parliament. We analyze the footprints that different elements associated with good administration have been leaving in Spanish and EU jurisprudence (efficiency, effectiveness, motivation, good contractual performance or good civil service selection, rile of law, and so on… ). Also the sound administrative organization is non-negligible part of the concept, although the Administrative Law has paid little attention to it (focused, from its initial configuration, in the study of administrative “diseases”, that is, the judicial control of the Administration). In the Treaty of Lisbon the right to a good administration has been recognized as one of the rights of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, with important consequences for all purposes. We also discuss his relationship with transparency as recognized in Spanish Act 19/2013, on Administrative Transparency. Although the principle of good administration should not have a moralistic bias, being composed the Administration by officials, it is desirable that they tend to virtue (St. Thomas Aquino), which exceeds paradoxically, the purely legal.