Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Edited by
and
v
vi Contents
Index 371
List of Illustrations
Figures
3.1 European trust in national governments for 15
EU countries, 2003–2013 (%) 50
3.2 Trust in civil service in 17 West European
countries, 2005 (%) 51
7.1 Number of policy officials employed by the Permanent
Representations at the European Union of four EU-member
states 117
19.1 Levels of political and administrative system reform 337
Tables
5.1 Economic growth, quality of public institutions and
corruption of selected Asian states 79
5.2 Public sector reform capacity: institutional veto points,
bureaucratic autonomy and reform results in selected Asian
countries in the 1990s 80
5.3 Moon and Ingraham’s PNT and public sector reform
in selected Asian countries in the 1990s 90
5.4 Economic growth and corruption of selected Asian states 91
6.1 Attributes and broad indicators of state fragility 101
6.2 Comparison of GDP and governance and output
indicators 2011/2012 103
6.3 African public management capacity, 2011: Mo Ibrahim
governance scores 104
6.4 Core reform elements required for revitalizing Africa’s
civil services in the 21st century 110
9.1 Local government systems (traditional profiles) 165
9.2 Local public employment, general public employment and
general employment in country-comparative perspective
2012/2013 168
9.3 Development of local public employment in
country-comparative perspective 176
12.1 A typology of incentive systems associated with three
common public sector incentives 231
18.1 High level of trust in elected politicians in 2010 330
vii
List of Contributors
viii
List of Contributors ix
Tony J.G. Verheijen is Country Manager for Serbia, Europe and Central
Asia at the World Bank.
1 Introduction
In the first edition of this book (The Civil Service in the 21st Century,
Raadschelders, Toonen, and Van der Meer, 2007) we noted that between
the early 1990s and the mid-2000s civil service systems (CSS) had come
under intense scrutiny. The role and position of the civil service as core
actors in the public sector had been seriously questioned by political
pundits and other actors in society and academia. It seemed that the
central position of civil servants in the political-administrative and
societal systems was eroding and that the supposed monopoly of the
civil service in public service delivery had gradually broken down. Some
visionaries even expected the demise of the civil service as we know
it (Demmke, 2004, 2005; Demmke and Moilanen, 2010). As we now
know, this particular prophecy was grossly exaggerated, reflecting the
author’s wish rather than an empirical fact. In fact, as we can see in
several of the updated and renewed chapters in this volume, the fiscal
crisis that has troubled many countries has resulted in popular rejec-
tion of political officeholders and a strengthening of the social and
professional status of civil servants. Of course, it cannot be denied that,
owing to a variety of reasons, CSS have increasingly been influenced by
a range of internal and external pressures prompted by changes in the
institutional context. These internal and environmental changes will be
examined in this volume and will be introduced in this chapter. Taken
together, these changes supposedly amount to a new, more fragmented
order in the public domain generally referred to nowadays as multi-level
governance. In this supposed new order, governments and CSS have to
find their place. Although there appears to be some common under-
standing in the scientific community with respect to the nature of these
1
2 Jos C.N. Raadschelders et al.
discuss in more detail the four sections of this book and the various
chapters in each (Section 3).
At the same time, though, the existence of multiple policy- and deci-
sion-making arenas or networks has made government and its CSS more
aware of the intermediary role no one else can play. In other words,
more than ever before, civil servants have become brokers among a wide
range of nonprofit and private stakeholders. While in a variety of policy
areas governments still take the initiative (cf. the active state concept),
it is the government of the enabling state that has come to the surface
(Page and Wright, 2007).
These international and national developments are captured in the
conceptual shift from unified, national state government to multi-level
governance. Before the late 1980s and 1990s the concept of governance
was hardly used in public administration and political science litera-
ture.1 Since then, public administration scholars and political scientists
have embraced this fashionable concept, and often more for its norma-
tive connotation rather than for its analytical potential.2 They should
more consider perspective, which will sooner downplay the novelty of
phenomena than declare the coming of a new age (Peters and Pierre,
2004).
Coming from the World Bank report on sub-Saharan development in
1989 the concept of good governance emphasizes the interplay between
state and civil society with regard to decision making and service
delivery in the public domain. Although the use of the concept in public
administration and political science might be comparatively recent,
from an empirical and historical point of view its content and occur-
rence are certainly not (see Chapter 7 in this volume by Van den Berg
and Toonen). Several examples come to mind. In consociational states
such as Germany and the Netherlands, governmental and third-sector
actors at national, regional, and local levels have worked together in the
development and implementation of policy and the provision of serv-
ices since, at least, the 16th century. But, private actors may also operate
independently from public actors, as is the case with, for example, the
establishment of private schools and hospitals, with charities, and with
the public utilities concessions in the second part of the 19th century.
The expansion of the welfare state did not make these initiatives redun-
dant, although in some countries, such as France and perhaps the UK,
the role of national government had become more important than in
others (such as the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden).
The multi-level governance concept resembles closely the strengths
of network theory, that is, focusing attention on the interdependence
between and substantial cooperation among various public, semi-pri-
vate, private, and nonprofit actors in public service delivery. But this
Civil Service Systems and the Challenges 5
and principles are manifest in, inter alia, the design of specific deci-
sion-making procedures (including rules, e.g. about the involvement
of career civil servants in setting policy directions). This constitutes
an intermediate level of analysis. At the most visible level of analysis,
CSS includes rules of human resource management (e.g. the notion
of internal labor market). The actual substance (in terms of rules) of
these CSS and their organizational manifestation varies across nations
and over time. In this perspective the emergence of multi-level govern-
ance might be regarded as a change in rule structure and substance, thus
creating, first, a different institutional environment for and, second,
possibly changing the rule structure and substance of CSS. Neither is
inconceivable. For instance, efforts to establish the Rechtsstaat princi-
ples in Central and Eastern Europe and in many developing countries
provides a different institutional environment for civil servants and had
some consequences for the internal features of CSS (see Chapter 2 by
Verheijen and Rabrenovich, as well as Chapter 6 by Adamolekun and
Olowu, this volume). Adding into this environmental complexity is that
governments and their CSS are not isolated but aware of the changes
and reforms each experience. The exact design and developmental route
of CSS is conditioned by particular societal and political-administrative
contexts.
From what has been said above, we can distill the main elements of our
study. First, the importance of considering the existence or absence of
variation regarding both the design and reform of civil service systems.
Second, the importance of the (discovery of the) multi-level govern-
ance context for existing civil service systems both on a macro (system
or parts thereof) and micro (the individual civil servants) level. Third,
the normative dimension and the internal inconsistencies relevant to
CSS have grown in importance. Fourth, CSS needs to be considered in
relation to its immediate institutional/organizational environment: the
political system and its officeholders
This book is thus divided into four parts. In Part 1, we will examine
current issues and changes affecting the civil service systems that were
included in the civil service project. Thus, we will examine the state
of affairs in Central and Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, in Anglo-
American countries, and in Asian countries. The chapter on Africa is
co-authored by Ladipo Adamolekun and Dele Olowu. The binding
theme in this part is the public sector reform dimension and the
Civil Service Systems and the Challenges 7
state. They categorize reform efforts in various states into four major
groups (advanced reformers, committed reformers, hesitant reformers,
and beginners/non-starters). Reform outcomes vary with the degree of
political, social, and economic turbulence. The major focus of reform
has turned to the influence of culture and governance on CSS and their
relation with the various groups in society.
In Part 2 we go beyond the dominant view of civil service systems as
only a personnel system at the national level, by pointing to the larger
(institutional) environment and to differences in rank and in level of
government. Traditionally civil service (system) research had a tendency
to focus on the civil service as a labor organization positioned at the
national level and using a government-centered approach. Increasingly,
in the past decade attention is shifting from a hierarchically state-cen-
tered perspective concerning government to a multi-level approach
captured by the concept of governance. This shift also places civil
servants in an entirely new light: they are not just subordinates, quiet
yet persistent experts, or policy drafters, but also network managers.
Therefore, ample attention will be given to the emergent perspective of
multi-level governance.
Caspar van den Berg and Theo Toonen suggest that multi-level
governance rests on three pillars: lack of a single center of authority,
the involvement of non-state actors in policy making and implemen-
tation, and interaction in the public realm not so much guided by
constitutional arrangement but, instead, fluid, informal, and hori-
zontal (Chapter 7). They discuss several trends that currently strengthen
multi-level governance and suggest that these potentially result in two
contradictory trends: politicization of the core bureaucracy as well as a
depolitization of administrative bodies. How influential this multi-level
governance structure is becomes clear in the chapter of Philippe Bezes
and Martin Lodge in which they examine exogenous and endogenous
influences upon the dynamics of administrative change (Chapter 8).
Could it be that too much attention is given to external factors, such as
societal environment and institutional arrangements, and too little to
factors internal to CSS such as the influence of minor reforms becoming
more influential later (the displacement effect), the introduction of new
layers in the existing decision-making structures, and the challenge of
replacing a rapidly aging and soon retiring middle and higher level civil
service? Both Chapters 7 and 8 address macro-level issues.
The next three chapters in this section are more focused on micro-level
issues. Chapters 9 and 10 bring two groups of ‘forgotten’ civil servants
to the forefront, while Chapter 11 focuses on the traditional, but no less
Civil Service Systems and the Challenges 9
this chapter is that career civil servants who are members of the Senior
Executive Service should forgo their right to vote in any election so that
their elected officeholders and political appointees know that they can
rely on the non-partisanship of these SES-ers. The content of the chapter
is still relevant today and has not been updated (Professor Rohr passed
away in 2011).
Does social status of civil servants matter when it comes to civil serv-
ants’ responsibilities? Judicialization and constitutional responsibili-
ties are revisited by Gerrit Dijkstra in his reflection on responsibility,
accountability, and performance (Chapter 15). He carefully argues that
any one-dimensional approach is simplistic. Indeed, in recent years the
traditional vertical approaches to this issue (professional-ethical – cf.
Friedrich; political-institutional – cf. Finer; and political-societal – cf.
judicialization) have been complemented with the more horizontal and
programmatic approach characteristic for performance measurement
and management. Is this a viable alternative to the more traditional,
hierarchical approaches to accountability? Whatever the answer is,
a civil servant/manager can only function properly and adequately if
sensitive to the societal environment. This sensitivity is not just one
of responsiveness to societal needs and problems but also one of prop-
erly and adequately managing the interaction of political and societal
actors. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre focus on the Weberian, the NPM, and
the governance perspectives upon managing the interaction with the
environment (Chapter 16). They point out the importance of acknowl-
edging that government and governance co-exist and that the main
challenge is how to balance the traditional, juridical role of government
what that of its mediating capacity among a variety of nonprofit and
private actors.
In Part 4, titled “Beyond Civil Service Systems?,” we look at the impli-
cations of civil service reform for political-administrative relations, for
politics, and for the political-administrative system at large in the 21st
century. First, we assess the impact of the reforms summarized in Part 1,
and further analyzed in terms of consequences in Parts 2 and 3. Then we
consider the degree to which political system reforms might be comple-
mentary to civil service reforms. Finally, recent literature on political-
administrative relations further underlines the increased importance of
civil servants in the development and implementation of public law and
government policy.
Richard Stillman attempts to glean lessons from the events leading up
to and happening since the introduction of the Senior Executive Service
in the United States (Chapter 17). While this only represents one case
12 Jos C.N. Raadschelders et al.
of reform, and that limited to the top of the career civil service, it does
emphasize a variety of commonsensical insights useful anywhere. At the
same time, his discussion also shows how much institutional tradition
and culture matter. So, can we draw lessons from the past for the future?
Of those advanced by Stillman we will only mention that for reform to
be successful time is needed, and more specifically a time period that
encompasses several administrations/cabinets. This brings the role of
politics and political officeholders to center stage. Reforms of CSS have
undoubtedly influenced political-administrative relations. The question
is: in what way? Are civil servants more subordinate to politics than
before because of financial restraints, budget cuts, and the triumph of
managerial values? Luc Rouban addresses this question and paints a
much more nuanced picture than often found in literature (Chapter 18).
It appears that politics intervenes both more and less, dependent upon
issue salience. However, in light of the fiscal crisis since 2008, Rouban
notes that it is more difficult to assess the impact of NPM, especially since
the urge for austerity may both prompt further cuts as well as increase
tensions between political and administrative officeholders. First, the
fiscal crisis of 2008 has strengthened both distrust of political leaders as
well as discontent with privatization and contracting out. Second, some
of the new material that he presents shows how even civil servants have
about as much trust in their elected officeholders as citizens do, and this
is especially the case for lower- and middle-level civil servants.
However, the nature of that intervention varies with whether
NPM-type reforms were imposed (i.e. top-down NPM-reform) or volun-
tarily embraced (i.e. bottom-up NPM reform).The matter of whether
NPM reforms were imposed or embraced takes attention to the political
system itself: more specifically, to the degree to which civil service and
administrative reforms can succeed without political (system) reform.
This question is considered by Jos C.N. Raadschelders and Marie-Louise
Bemelmans-Videc (Chapter 19). Is the political environment as impor-
tant to success or failure of administrative reforms as it is to the success
or failure of public policy (see also Van der Meer, 2006)?
In the concluding chapter we will revisit the various topics in this
volume and organize that chapter on the basis of the civil service defi-
nition used in this project: Mediating institutions for the mobilization of
human resources in the service of the state in a given territory. We also offer
a neo-Weberian perspective upon the role and position of the state,
and thus of civil servants, in contemporary society. It is in that neo-
Weberian perspective that we encompass both NPM and governance
Civil Service Systems and the Challenges 13
Notes
1.. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries the historians’ use of the concept of
governance dominated. See, for example, Wolffe (1971).
2.. The concept of governance has become quite popular and has a normative
ring to it. It is considered superior to hierarchy, under-appreciates the need of
formal institutions, and is biased toward process. We will define this concept
in a neutral manner later in this chapter.
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2
Civil Service Development in
Central and Eastern Europe and
the CIS: A Perfect Storm?
Tony J.G. Verheijen and Aleksandra Rabrenovic
1 Introduction
15
16 Tony J.G. Verheijen and Aleksandra Rabrenovic
with a particular emphasis on the fiscal crisis (and response to this), the
EU as a factor, and issues of economic competitiveness.
private sector or, in most instances, abroad (Kickert et al., 2013). States
outside the EU’s immediate sphere have been affected by the fiscal
crisis to different degrees. While Ukraine has come close to economic
collapse, Russia and most states in Central Asia saw stagnation, but not
the deep reversal of economic development levels witnessed in Central
and Eastern Europe.
Fiscal crises often provide opportunities to push through reforms
that are needed but are politically unpopular. However, the trend in
Central and East European states has been for this to further erode
public sector management capacity. The main response to the crisis
has been in pay adjustments and, in some cases, the reduction of the
number of civil servants. As examples, Slovenia, in February 2009,
introduced public expenditure reductions beside economic recovery
measures. The public sector cuts consisted of reducing basic salaries,
reductions in the costs of business trips and remuneration for civil
servants’ holidays. In Estonia, the passage of the new Public Service
Act in 2012 abandoned seniority pay and public service pension provi-
sions (Kickert et al., 2013). Although Hungary was heavily hit by the
economic crisis, the impact on the public sector was less significant.
As a part of the 2009 Bajnai Package,3 salaries of civil servants were cut
by 8 percent (corresponding to the abolishment of the so-called 13th
month wage), and a hiring freeze was introduced (RCPAR, 2010). In
Macedonia, the anti-crisis measures undertaken by the government in
2009 consisted of postponement of a planned 10 percent rise in public
sector salaries and abolishment of bonuses (RCPAR, 2010). The total
budget for public sector remuneration was reduced by 6.13 percent
in 2010 compared to 2009. Similar measures were also taken at the
state level of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In line with stipulations in the
IMF lending agreement, signed in 2009, public sector salaries were
cut by 10 percent. In addition, meal supplements were reduced, and
transportation subsidies for public servants living within a three-kil-
ometer radius from their workplace were abolished (RCPAR, 2010).
In Serbia, at the end of April 2009, the National Assembly adopted
the Law on Temporary Reduction of Salaries in the Public Sector by
which the amount of salaries for officials with higher salary levels
was reduced by 10–15 percent. The duration of the effectiveness of
the law was limited to the period from May 2009 to December 2010.
Similar measures, exemplified in the reduction of the salary levels of
higher-paid public sector employees (including civil servants) were
introduced after the second crises wave, in October 2013 and are still
in force.
28 Tony J.G. Verheijen and Aleksandra Rabrenovic
feedback systems that we have witnessed in other parts of the world has
simply not (yet) occurred.
3.5 Conclusion
Administrative and civil service reform in Central and Eastern Europe
and the CIS have gone through a number of up and down cycles over
the past almost 25 years. From almost complete neglect in 1990–1996,
a flurry of reform initiatives followed, driven by EU accession processes
and reversals in economic fortunes. After EU accession a reversal of
reforms followed in most new member states, while PA reforms were
stepped up in Russia, Kazakhstan and other CIS states. The fiscal crisis
has further aggravated the malaise in civil service systems throughout
the region, but most of all in new EU member states and the Western
Balkans. In this part of the region it is particularly the lack of vision and
concepts of what kind of civil service systems should be developed that
is disconcerting. The need for a new paradigm, reflecting political class
preferences but also the interests and incentives of the talent that the
public sector needs to attract, is obvious, though none appears to be
emerging at this point.
Further east, reforms in states such as Armenia, Kazakhstan and
Georgia remain more promising, with the first two in particular having
made strong progress in establishing permanent and professional
central PA systems, though still struggling to translate this into better
service delivery at the front line. Russia has equally continued efforts to
Civil Service Development in Central and Eastern Europe 33
modernize its civil service system, but the debate between modernizers
and conservatives around this reform process continues to act as a brake
on progress.
In sum, in the cycles of ups and downs in civil service system devel-
opment in Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS the current period
is definitely a ‘down,’ with limited prospects of an upturn in the fore-
seeable future. From the point of view of economic development and
competitiveness, this is a real constraint that still appears to be little
understood by the ruling elite.
What can the emergence of new civil service systems in CEE countries
teach us about the usefulness of different models? The clash between
the Anglo-American custom-based and management-driven civil
service, and the continental European formal and rule-driven system,
was clearly visible in debates in the 1990s and early 2000s, but has in
recent years been overtaken by the realization that especially for the
new member states of the EU a new approach or paradigm might be
needed. The traditional continental European model has not found
the traction that had been expected and the management-driven
model has equally not established itself because offiscal constraints
and reasons of ‘fit.’
While further east we have seen civil service systems emerge that might
come closer to the state-led development-driven models of East Asia, in
particular in Kazakhstan, much of the Central and East European region
continues to look for a paradigm. Some of the contours of this paradigm
are visible: a more politically driven civil service with less guarantees
and permanency, where younger staff especially see ‘learning’ opportu-
nities, but not long-term career interest.
The extent to which this state of flux will continue is largely dependent
on whether or not the relative instability of many Central and East
European civil service systems will be perceived as having an impact on
economic development opportunities and, for EU member states and
candidates, affects their ability to benefit from EU membership. As for
now, neither politicians nor academics have a well-developed answer to
the, surely far from ideal, instability of civil service systems. However,
once an equilibrium is found, this may well hold promise for other
systems in other parts of the world that equally struggle with the twin
problems of political aversion to a permanent (and potentially powerful)
34 Tony J.G. Verheijen and Aleksandra Rabrenovic
Notes
The views and opinions expressed in this paper are the personal views of the
authors only.
1. Bosnia and Herzegovina introduced performance-related pay by adoption of
the Law on Salaries in 2008, but the Law has still not been implemented,
primarily because of hard fiscal constraints.
2. This factor is usually mainly visible in the direction and not so much in the
substance of reform.
3. The government of Hungary introduced the Bajnai Package, named after the
new prime minister Gordon Bajnai.
4. Armenia continues to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world,
and has sustained this for the last four years.
5. For more extensive discussions on the subject, see Dimitrova (2002), Goetz
(2001) and Verheijen (2003, 2004).
6. On policy management, civil service, internal financial control, public
expenditure management, external financial control and procurement.
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36 Tony J.G. Verheijen and Aleksandra Rabrenovic
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3
Civil Service Systems in Western
Europe: A Comparative Analysis
Frits M. van der Meer, Trui Steen and Anchrit Wille
1 Introduction
38
Civil Service Systems in Western Europe 39
In the last two centuries most European countries have adopted compre-
hensive legal frameworks for their civil service systems. This was a long
and arduous process since legislation was adopted in a piecemeal manner.
Arguments of political expediency have often been at odds with producing
comprehensive (and often) codified schemes. The drive for more codi-
fied civil service legislation started in 1794 in Prussia with the inclusion
of ample provisions in the Preußische Allgemeine Landrecht. A recogniz-
able separate act dates from 1805 when the Hauptdienstpragmatik über die
Dienstverhältnisse der Staatsdiener was adopted in Bavaria. Codification
came relatively late in, for example, the Netherlands (1929), Belgium
(1930) and France (1946). The UK has adopted a statutory civil service
legislation in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act in 2010.
In continental legal thinking, enshrining rights and duties of civil
servants is traditionally seen as one of the cornerstones and critical
manifestations of the Rechtsstaat. Regulation regarding civil servants’
duties implies a standardization of previously – at least partially – auton-
omous civil servants (particularly those working in field agencies and
collegial organizations) by government centers through the emphasis
of hierarchical lines. Standardization concerns both the existence and
enforcement of a code of behavior based on ethical norms, as well as the
legal rights that protect civil servants against arbitrary interventions and
behavior of their political superiors.
The adoption of civil service laws constituted a bureaucratic revolu-
tion almost similar to the current impact of new public management in
the north-west corner of Europe. Crucial to civil service laws has been
the reform of personnel management into a more objective system of
recruitment and selection securing the hiring of qualified and skilled
civil servants. This includes an aversion to appointments on the basis
of (political) nepotism, but not necessarily the inclusion of political
merit criteria (Van der Meer and Raadschelders, 1998). Regulations have
been refined and expanded in order to limit the room for discretion and
thus avoid, according to the dominant view, what was seen as abuse or
40 Frits M. van der Meer, Trui Steen and Anchrit Wille
Germany, Italy and other South European countries. The need to reduce
financial economic problems given the banking crises has given a new
impetus to implementing NPM-like measures, often under EU pressure
(Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011).
Fundamental questions have been raised regarding the need for keeping
a distinct public approach to government employment issues. Should
public sector employment be enjoying a public law basis or should it
be integrated in the private sector system? This particular question is
of course only pertinent to the public law countries excluding the UK.
Although the public law status has been formally retained on important
issues in most countries (with the exception of for the majority of public
servants in, for instance, Italy, Denmark and Sweden), the public nature
of the system has decreased. Labor negotiations, pay settlements, social
security and benefits have often been made compatible with private
sector arrangements, limiting the previous high level of job security in
the public sector. A distinction has to be made between a right of tenure
and a right to a particular job. Measures such as the introduction of
limits on the time a (top) civil servant is placed in a particular position
have been introduced in Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries
(Demmke, 2004, 2005; Demmke and Moilanen, 2010). Increasingly, the
specific nature of the civil service position and status (not necessarily
under public law) is reappreciated, since they are considered to be rele-
vant for safeguarding the public interest and maintaining ethical stand-
ards (Shim, 2001; Van der Meer, Van den Berg and Gerrit, 2013).
Redesigning personnel management systems has involved programs
directed towards a reduction of the size of public employment and
towards breaking the civil service monopoly in public service delivery.
Through a combination of downsizing, privatization, public tendering
and contracting out it was thought possible to end public service
monopoly and to introduce competition. Deconstructing the remaining
public sector through a combined process of territorial decentralization
and agencification constituted an additional option to erode public
sector power.
An important component of personnel policies after the 1980s was
downsizing. As a large percentage of government expenditure has to do
with salaries, an ambition was formulated to do ‘more with less,’ leading
to cutback programs. It is extremely difficult to interpret the statistics.
Apart from real substantive staff reductions that have been realized at
the expense particularly of industrial and civilian military staff, actual
results are difficult to read because of changing definitions and reor-
ganization within the public sector. The latter has been particularly
42 Frits M. van der Meer, Trui Steen and Anchrit Wille
Although the belief is widespread that the public sector has politicized,
it is difficult to substantiate this assertion given the many meanings of
the term. Politicization is a convenient umbrella term. The politicization
of civil service systems can refer to the (changing) number of (party)
political appointments and (party) political behavior, as well as political
sensitivity of civil servants (Van der Meer and Raadschelders, 1998).
Hojnacki (1996) argues that civil service politicization implies a viola-
tion of the principle of political neutrality. But this view is based on the
unsubstantiated claim of an administrative past in which neutrality was
the norm. Also, the term ‘political neutrality’ is not unambiguous. An
‘apolitical’ and ‘neutral’ civil service has to operate in an environment
that is highly politically defined (Page and Wright, 1999). According
to most contemporary and Weberian (Page, 1992) definitions, politics
is not limited to certain persons, institutions or specialized arenas in
46 Frits M. van der Meer, Trui Steen and Anchrit Wille
which an action takes place. Politics can be defined as the process that
determines ‘who gets what, when and how’ (Lasswell, 1936). In this
sense many public servants are involved in politics, even if they stay
clear of party politics. The pattern regarding the demarcation between
political and administrative systems in the 19th and 20th centuries,
however, has been, in a formal sense, to shield the civil service from
overt party-political control in order to enhance its efficiency and to
ensure its fairness (Peters and Pierre, 2004; Rouban, 2012; Van der Meer
and Raadschelders, 1998).
We distinguish between bottom-up and top-down politicization
(Peters and Pierre, 2004; Wille, 2013). Bottom-up politicization pertains
to the increase of political activity by civil servants. Given the exten-
sive scope of the politicization concept this can include party-political
allegiance and behavior, a policy-oriented attitude and the awareness
of the political context of public service delivery. There are countries
where some (senior) civil servants are still forbidden to be (active)
members of political parties (e.g. the UK and Ireland). In the majority
of the remaining countries (e.g. Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden)
there is an increasing tendency for civil servants to be party members.
There are usually limitations for active political participation at the level
of government where one is employed. Civil servants who do so have
to vacate the job temporarily or permanently. Regarding the policy-ori-
ented attitude and the awareness of the political context of public service
delivery, there has been a definite trend (with the possible exception of
the Italian civil service) towards a more politicized situation, although
this progress has been mitigated by the rise of a managerial attitude in
government with its proclaimed emphasis on technical rationality.
Top-down politicization involves an increased level of control exerted
by government over bureaucrats. Top-down politicization occurs when
political officeholders try to ensure that the opinions and behavior of
public servants are (made) compatible with their own policy prefer-
ences. According to Van der Meer (2009) there is an extensive repertoire
of politicization methods:
70%
2003
60% 2013
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Fi n
d
he K
Be s
er ia
xe ium
Fr g
ce
ly
Ire k
nd
Po n
e
ga
an
nd
ar
e
an
ur
ai
ec
U
Ita
r
an
ed
la
st
Sp
rtu
m
bo
m
rla
Lu lg
re
nl
Au
Sw
en
G
m
G
D
et
N
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
e ce
Be nds
its urg
ly
G al
e
Sw ay
Fi n
D and
Ic rk
Ire d
nd
he ny
m m
nd
Po in
ec
Ita
e
an
g
U
a
an
xe iu
a
w
et a
ed
la
la
rtu
Sw bo
Sp
rla
re
m
N rm
Lu lg
nl
el
or
er
Fr
en
N
Figure 3.2 Trust in civil service in 17 West European countries, 2005 (%)
Source: World Values Survey, 2005 wave, except for Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece,
Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, where data from the 1999 wave were used.
6 Conclusion
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4
Anglophone Systems: Diffusion
and Policy Transfer within an
Administrative Tradition
John Halligan
1 Introduction
57
58 John Halligan
ensemble of reforms – came from British writers who first discerned the
trend under Thatcher (Pollitt, 1990). In addition to the major reforms
in Britain (e.g. privatization and executive agencies), individual country
programs gained international significance, with New Zealand’s ‘public
management model’ and the US’s ‘reinvention’ being influential. The
reform movement therefore served to reinforce the notion of the Anglo-
American group’s identity both internally and externally as distinctive
and contrasting with that of other countries.
In the early years of reform, and intermittently since then, the strong
influence of the UK and the US was apparent as indicated by the transfers:
financial management and efficiency scrutinies from the UK as well as
a raft of other reforms such as privatization and joined-up government;
central personnel management, pay-for-performance (Peters, 1997), and
the senior executive service; policy tsars (Levitt and Solesbury, 2012) can
be linked to the US. With some exceptions (e.g. accrual accounting
and the charter of budget honesty are associated with New Zealand;
citizen surveys with Canada; and Centrelink with Australia), the UK has
tended to be the leader on reforms initiatives. Several cases indicate the
complexities of diffusion and transfers, and the difficulties with estab-
lishing the connections.
The case of financial management indicates how countries facing
similar environmental pressures chose similar solutions, but different
contexts mean that this does not necessary lead to the same results or that
implementation was straightforward. The UK’s Financial Management
Initiative (FMI) and the Australian Financial Management Improvement
Program (FMIP) provide a basis for comparing the relationship between
them. FMIP (1983) followed FMI in time (1982) with an intent that was
similar, as was much of the content. Both formed the basis for mana-
gerialism in the two countries (Halligan and Power, 1992; Pollitt, 1990;
Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011).6
The origin of FMI and FMIP can be traced to the UK’s Fulton report
(1968), which espoused the notion of accountable management. This was
then picked up by a succession of committees in Britain, and the govern-
ment’s response was formulated in the Financial Management Initiative
(1982). In Australia a Royal Commission (RCAGA 1976) adopted account-
able management from Britain, which was eventually incorporated in a
Anglophone Systems 65
coverage without proceeding very far with the arrangements at the sub-
departmental level (Savoie, 1994).
A more intriguing case was that of the incorporation of the UK concept
of the accounting officer in the Canadian Federal Accountability Act
2006 (Heintzman, 2013). The problem lay with the implementation
in a different context. Heintzman’s conclusion was that ‘the version
of the accounting officer implemented in the FedAA had none of the
key features of its British model and several fatal innovations’ (2013:
92). In particular, there was an assumption the accounting office would
be accountable (rather than answerable) to a parliamentary committee
rather than to the treasury department.
5 Conclusion
Notes
1. For example, the head of the Australian Finance Department spent two years
seconded to the British Cabinet Office.
2. Sir Peter Gershon conducted a review of ICT in Australia (2008) having previ-
ously been responsible for an efficiency review in the UK (2004–2005).
Anglophone Systems 73
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1 Introduction
77
78 John P. Burns
Source: Transparency International (2014a); UNDP (2005); World Bank (2002); World
Economic Forum (2004).
Table 5.2 Public sector reform capacity: institutional veto points, bureaucratic
autonomy and reform results in selected Asian countries in the 1990s
2.2.1 Japan
The Japanese political system is organized in a way that frustrates the
political executive. First, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s
current ruling party, is composed of institutionalized factions that
provide financial support for faction members and bargain among
themselves for leadership positions. Which faction leader becomes the
leader of the LDP (and thus perhaps the prime minister) depends on a
bargain worked out among the various faction leaders (Painter, 2003:
241–242). This sort of structure institutionalizes veto points. Second,
within Japan’s LDP, policy cliques (zoku) of sectorally organized groups
that bring producers and bureaucrats together, increase the number of
veto players considerably. The cliques develop close ties to private busi-
nessmen and civil servants. They are seen as the experts in the policy
sector. They are also important instruments for distributing spoils within
the party and are part of a vast network of money politics and corruption
that characterizes the political system (Beeson, 2003: 33; Painter, 2005:
242). Factions and policy cliques play a key role in the LDP and help to
disable the political executive. Third, in Japan politicians are recruited
in large numbers from among retired bureaucrats, and this ensures that
the political executive is weakened in its struggles with the bureaucracy
(Beeson, 2003: 32–33).
In spite of this institutional set-up, there has been no dearth of admin-
istrative reform policies, programs and plans. The First and Second
Provisional Civil Service Reform Councils in 1961 and 1981 have had
limited success but did manage to cut the civil service by 5 percent and
reorganize some central ministries. The participation of senior civil serv-
ants as members of the councils allowed them to effectively protect
their interests (Painter, 2003: 243–244). The LDP’s loss of power in 1993
allowed further public sector reform on to the agenda. Struggles over
structural reform of the Ministry of Finance (MOF) lasted for years and
only culminated in 2000 when a new bureau, the Financial Services
Agency, took over some MOF duties. Generally public sector reform
in Japan has been characterized by delay, reluctance to reform, grid-
lock, and opposition from the bureaucracy (Beeson, 2003; Nakamura,
2003: 37; Painter, 2003: 242–243). Struggle over public sector reform,
however, has not prevented some privatization of public assets, such
as the Japanese National Railways in 1987, and the huge postal savings
84 John P. Burns
system which includes the largest banks and insurance companies in the
world and other businesses starting in 2006.
2.2.3 Taiwan
Since the mid-1980s public sector reform strategies in Taiwan have
been designed in the context of democratization. When opposition
forces coalesced into the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 1986
and many non-governmental organizations emerged, the relationship
of the state to society changed fundamentally. The authoritarian state
no longer imposed its will on society . State–society relations had to be
negotiated. Clearly the state in Taiwan was losing autonomy, becoming
more embedded in society. As a result calls to modernize the state struc-
ture became more insistent (Cheung, 2003a: 100).
The democratization of Taiwan in the 1990s has expanded the
number of veto points considerably, thus undercutting the capacity of
the political executive to carry out administrative reform. The election
of DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian to the Presidency in 2000 while the
traditional ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), still held control of the
legislature resulted in stalemate in many areas, including administrative
reform.
Unlike the governments of Japan and Korea, the traditional post-
1947 leadership in Taiwan (the KMT) used SOEs as key instruments of
industrial development (Evans, 1995: 55).3 In the 1950s, Taiwan’s SOEs
accounted for over half of all fixed industrial production. It fell in the
1960s, but expanded again in the 1970s (Evans, 1995: 55–56; Wade,
1990). As Wade points out, unlike Japan and Korea, the private sector
was largely absent from policy networks dominated by the KMT. To a
large extent, Taiwan’s network of strategically placed SOEs, each with
its own set of relations with private firms, compensated for the lack of a
well-developed network of ties between the state and the private sector
(Evans, 1995: 56).
Authorities in Singapore have adopted a similar strategy in some
respects, relying to a large extent on government-linked corporations
(GLCs), which partnered with multi-national corporations to grow the
economy. In the mid-1980s there were more than 500 GLCs. After some
privatizations (1991) 419 remained providing ‘an important support
for the Singapore economy’ (Cheung, 2003b: 139). In both states, these
public companies, whose leaders were appointed by the government,
linked the state to the private sector. We should not, though, exaggerate
the lack of embeddedness (Evans, 1995: 56).
Perhaps because of the bureaucracy’s relative autonomy, public
sector reform in Taiwan has been modest. Not until the 1990s, when
the KMT came under serious challenge from the DPP, did the political
86 John P. Burns
Elite consensus also exists on the nature and content of public admin-
istration reforms, such as depoliticizing the civil service, one the one
hand, and more managerial reforms, on the other. These have included
downsizing, pay reform, performance management and contracting
out. Bureaucratic resistance to these changes has thus far been minimal
(Cheung, 2003: 100, 112) but progress in these areas has been slow.
2.2.4 Singapore
The political system of Singapore is structured to enable the People’s
Action Party (PAP) to dominate elections and indeed, for much of the
past 40 years or so since Singapore became independent, the PAP has
held all but a few seats in the legislature (Worthington, 2003). Since
the PAP took power in 1959, the party actively fostered the unity of the
political and bureaucratic elite in a ‘power sharing pact’ which is the
foundation of the PAP’s social control and policy capacity (Worthington,
2003: 20–21). The inner core executive of PAP ministers and higher civil
service is effectively fused. This arrangement and the suppression of
any effective political opposition means that few veto points exist to
constrain the political executive.
The autonomy of the Singaporean state has allowed it to design
and implement public sector reforms with a more or less free hand. As
Worthington and others have pointed out,
the penetration of the state into civil society is such that Singapore
is unique in [non-socialist] East and southeast Asia in the extent to
which its managerial state is able effectively to engineer the economic,
cultural and political behavior of its society. This has resulted in a
state which has been described as a curious cross between the Leninist
cell system and the Confucian Chinese Mandarinate. (Worthington,
2003: 2)
Table 5.3 Moon and Ingraham’s PNT and public sector reform in selected Asian
countries in the 1990s
Strength of
Country Politicians Bureaucracy civil society Reform result
4 Postscript
Note: Highest score (least corrupt) =91, lowest score (most corrupt)= 8.
Source: Transparency International (2014b); World Bank (2013).
Notes
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Hong Kong Research
Grants Council which provided funding for this research.
1. Bribery of public officials is highly correlated with economic development,
which may indicate that poorer countries such as China and Vietnam can
expect to ‘grow out’ of corruption. Other forms of corruption, however,
that link politicians to business interests are probably not captured by these
indices. These forms of corruption have characterized politics in Japan and
Korea (Beeson, 2003; Painter, 2003) and could develop in the socialist states as
they become richer. These problems raise questions about how best to measure
the outputs of administrative reform.
2. Unlike Russia and the Central European states neither China nor Vietnam
adopted large-scale ‘big-bang’ type privatization. While there have been priva-
tizations of locally owned state-owned enterprises, official policy has been to
preserve large strategically important SOEs in both countries. In China by
2003 there were about 23,000 state-owned enterprises of which about 2000
were classified as ‘large.’ About 200 of these are owned and managed by the
central government.
3. The establishment of many of these SOEs dates from the Japanese colonial era
in Taiwan.
4. See the summary provided of such studies in UNESCAP, ‘Evaluating the Impact
of Changes in Ownership’.
References
Barnett, A. Doak (1967) Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Communist
China (New York: Columbia University Press).
Beeson, Mark (2003) ‘Japan’s Reluctant Reformers and the Legacy of the
Developmental State,’ in Anthony B.L. Cheung and Ian Scott (eds) Governance
and Public Sector Reform in Asia: Paradigm Shifts or Business as Usual? (London:
Routledge Curzon), pp. 25–43.
Berman, Evan M., M. Jae Moon and Heungsuk Choi (eds) (2010) Public
Administration in East Asia: Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
(Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press).
Burns, John P. (2005) ‘Civil Service Reform,’ in OECD (ed.) Governance in China
(Paris: OECD), pp. 49–75.
Cheung, Anthony B.L. (2003a) ‘Government Reinvention in Taiwan:
Administrative Modernization and Regime Transition,’ in Anthony B.L. Cheung
and Ian Scott (eds) Governance and Public Sector Reform in Asia: Paradigm Shifts or
Business as Usual? (London: Routledge Curzon), pp. 90–116.
Cheung, Anthony B.L. (2003b) ‘Public Service Reform in Singapore: Reinventing
Government in a Global Age,’ in Anthony B.L. Cheung and Ian Scott (eds)
Explaining Civil Service Reform in Asia 93
Governance and Public Sector Reform in Asia: Paradigm Shifts or Business as Usual?
(London: Routledge Curzon), pp. 138–162.
Cheung, Anthony B.L. and Ian Scott (2003) ‘Governance and Public Sector
Reforms in Asia: Paradigms, Paradoxes and Dilemmas,’ in Anthony B.L. Cheung
and Ian Scott (eds) Governance and Public Sector Reform in Asia: Paradigm Shifts or
Business as Usual? (London: Routledge Curzon), pp. 1–24.
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(Stanford: Stanford University Press).
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and Governance: An Examination of the Political Nexus Triads in Three Asian
Countries,’ Governance, 11, 77–100.
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94 John P. Burns
1 Introduction
One of the most remarkable changes that occurred since the publication
of the first edition of The Civil Service in the 21st Century is the drastically
improved economic performance of African countries. It is particularly
noteworthy because this upturn occurred at a time when the rest of the
world was plunged into a profound financial and economic crisis. In
contrast to the comparatively low performance of African economies
in the years before the crisis, many countries in the region have posted
5–8 percent GDP growth figures. The reasons for this turnaround are
multiple and complex but there is also a discernible worrying trend, and
that is of the increasing fragility of states in the region. Most of these
states have existed for 50 years and more since their independence from
colonial powers but they systematically lost their authority, capacity
and legitimacy to perform the basic state functions of security, welfare
and representation of their people.
One explanation for the above twin phenomena is that few of these
states’ political leadership appreciate the fact that economic perform-
ance provides an opportunity to restructure their economies and their
public administration systems. In this chapter, we analyze these two
trends, discuss their implications for civil service reforms and propose
a way forward. But we begin with a discussion of the historical back-
ground to the present juncture.
95
96 Ladipo Adamolekun and Dele Olowu
The civil service institutions (CSIs) inherited by the new African states
that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s had three advantages that enabled
many of them to perform satisfactorily during the immediate post-in-
dependence years. First, the CSIs operated in a context in which the
goals of governments were clearly articulated: win independence and
seek to improve the quality of life of the mass of the population through
the provision of infrastructure and services such as roads, energy, water,
education and health. Second, the political leaders who progressively
took over executive powers from the departing colonial rulers from
the early 1950s through the early 1960s were nationalists who were
committed to winning independence, and, in most cases, were conscious
of the need for strong and well-equipped CSIs that would serve as instru-
ments for ensuring the continuity of the state, maintaining law and
order, and assuring better living standards for the people.
The third advantage was the inheritance (from the departing colonial
governments) of career civil service systems led by small numbers of well-
trained, experienced and committed senior civil servants that provided
quality leadership for the institutions in most of these new states in
the different sub-regions of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).1 These higher
civil servants were as committed to the principles of the inherited civil
service institutions (notably, merit-based recruitment and promotion,
political neutrality and security of tenure) as they were to the goals of
government articulated by the new political leaders. In some cases, the
two groups of leaders forged strong partnerships to nurture a competent
administration in the service of the state (Adamolekun, 2005: 25–27).
The initial tasks of localizing staff (replacing expatriates with nationals)
through merit-based recruitment and staff development and training
were launched and implemented fairly satisfactorily. At different times
in the 1960s, some CSIs in SSA (e.g. those in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and
Uganda) were favorably compared with the best in different parts of the
world (Olowu, 2001).
However, these advantages barely survived the first decade of inde-
pendence in most countries. The clarity of the goal of independence and
the shared commitment of political leaders, civil servants and the general
population to that goal were not transferred to the other goal of assuring
better living standards for the people. No sooner was independence won
than political leaders began to articulate different ‘paths’ to develop-
ment: ‘socialist,’ ‘capitalist,’ ‘non-capitalist’ and ‘mixed-economy.’
Africa: Revitalizing Civil Service Systems 97
Nigeria (the two largest economies) was close to 0.6 and 0.5 respectively.
For the mass of poor people, to assert as some observers do that over
22 countries in Africa have a GDP per capita of over 1000 US$ is little
consolation (Economist, 2012). And security of life and property is a
major concern in many countries in the region.
The above state of affairs has spurred and encouraged violence of diverse
types, from wild-cat strikes in RSA to the resurgence of Islamic extrem-
ists in Northern, Western and Eastern Africa. Hence, a Hobbesian state of
nature dawns for many countries in the continent. Consequently, regional
and national leaders have had to call up external assistance (either from
the United Nations or their former colonial powers) to help defend the
integrity of the state. Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Central Africa Republic, Sierra
Leone, Guinea, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, the two Sudans and the
two Congos, and so on, are all examples of countries confronting strong
resurgent elements that have exposed the extreme fragility of the state in
different parts of the continent (Olowu and Chanie, 2013).
There are controversies also about the nature and source of African
economic growth. There are those who explain such growth as due to
weak integration into the Eurozone economies (Africa Economic Outlook,
2012; African Development Bank Group, 2013). But many others who
have studied the subject more closely point to the fact that most of
the growth in Africa, as in the past, has been spurred primarily by
commodity booms, particularly by three forces: namely the discovery of
minerals, especially oil in many countries in the region (Ghana, Uganda
and Tanzania recently became oil and gas producers), the huge demand
for mineral and other natural resources by Asian emerging industrial
giants especially China and India, and the search for global capital for
higher yields in risk economies. All these forces can be reversed easily
and there are already worrying projections of the present strong Asian
demand for Africa’s natural resources (IMF, 2013). The question is will
Africa and African governments take advantage of this great opportunity
to fundamentally restructure their economies for longer-term growth
rather than ride the short-term spurts? This brings us to a proper appre-
ciation of the discourse on state fragility as it relates to African states.
From the growing and extensive literature on the subject, state fragility
is defined by three core expectations of a state in any political culture
(see especially Anten, Briscoe and Mezerra, 2012; Brinkerhoff, 2007;
Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum, 2012; Robinson and White, 1998;
Africa: Revitalizing Civil Service Systems 101
Core expectations
of a state Attributes Indicators
Source: Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012; Anten et al., 2012; Brinkerhoff, 2007; Gravingholt
et al., 2012; Robinson and White, 1998.
● Wars: especially civil wars; but surprisingly, wars are not the sole cause
of fragility. Some of the most fragile countries have not experienced
any wars since independence, but widespread domestic dissent has
made them ungovernable, leading to the unraveling of the economy
and society (Zimbabwe);
● Resource curse: which is essentially the perverse manner in which
weak governance interacts with the discovery of natural resource in
any economy, bringing poverty and the worst elements of greed into
rulership as war-lords struggle for power (Congo, Angola);
● The lack of bureaucratic capacity and social embeddedness (RSA);
● Absence of political compromise among differing elements in a
post-conflict country makes that country remain fragile even if
major achievements are recorded in the economic and social sectors
(Ethiopia);
● Even governance reforms, when not properly organized, might also
become a source of institutional failure (e.g. Malawi, with electoral
reforms that serve as an illustration of other African electoral reforms
that have only inflamed religious and ethnic tensions and divides;
see Olowu and Chanie, 2013);
● State fragility might also be transferred across borders to another
state: for example, Zimbabwe and the rest of the South African
Development Community (SADC) (Olowu and Chanie, 2013).
Oil exporters
Nigeria 6.3 56 43 11
Angola 8.4 56 40 34
Eq. Guinea 2.0 56 44 31
Gabon 6.2 59 22 31
Congo Rep 3.8 64 41 1
Middle income
South Africa 2.5 76 5 41
Ghana 7.0 60 7 29
Cameroon 4.7 58 36 31
Cote d’Ivoire 9.8 49 46 37
Botswana 3.5 72 3 62
Senegal 3.5 61 16 24
Low Income
Ethiopia 7.0 55 33 33
Kenya 4.7 60 25 15
Tanzania 6.9 58 10 33
Uganda 2.6 53 19 31
DRC 7.1 45 51 1
Mozambique 7.5 61 21 31
Human development
Public (welfare, education,
management Infrastructure and health)
Human development
Public (welfare, education,
management Infrastructure and health)
policy and effectively deliver services. Only three countries make first
class, while only 11 make second class, making a total of 14 countries
in the whole region that can be described as having an ‘above average’
public management system. Infrastructure measures access to hard social
overhead services such as electricity, road and rail networks, air trans-
portation facilities, telephones and IT infrastructure and digital connec-
tivity: the goods that actually constrain production in Africa and make
the region a costly place to do business (Calderon, 2009; Mbaku, 2013);
only two countries (Seychelles and Mauritius) make first class while three
others make second class (Tunisia, Botswana and Namibia). Even only
four others make the third class based on their total scores on the MIG:
Egypt, Cape Verde, Morocco and Lesotho. None of these countries are in
the high economic growth categories with 5 percent GDP per annum.
Even when we focus on soft social overhead infrastructure – welfare, educa-
tion and health, the areas that the international community has high-
lighted as a part of the MDGs since 2000 – only 10 countries are in the
first class, and another 10 in the second class, making a total of only 20
countries.
In all, then, and using this last index (social overhead infrastructure),
only 20 countries, at most, can be said to have a healthy state capacity
in the whole region. This reality has implications for the state public
and civil service in the region in every sense as demonstrated in the
next section.
What emerges from Tables 6.2 and 6.3 is a sobering sense of weak state
capacity generally and also of Africa’s public management capacity
in particular. State capacity is critical in the sense that this is the one
attribute that is available to a society to transform other state attributes
(authority and legitimacy) and the outcomes they bring about: namely,
security, welfare and representation. The crucial indicators that focus
on the hard and soft social overheads are particularly crucial because
these anchor sustainable economic growth and enhance human devel-
opment. The linkages between solid and sustainable infrastructures
on the one hand and sustainable development on the other are quite
robust and so are also the linkages of both to effective and virile public
services as well as the promotion and defense of freedom (Calderon,
2009; Mbaku, 2013; Suleiman, 1999). Public servants are responsible
for providing but not necessarily producing infrastructures. They must
identify the critical stakeholders in the production process and devise
appropriate institutional mechanisms that will ensure that hard and
Africa: Revitalizing Civil Service Systems 107
soft infrastructures are available, accessible and sustainable, and are well
maintained and accountably managed. This is why the campaign to
discourage public investment in hard (in favor of soft) infrastructures
and also for a robust higher public/civil service, though understand-
able in view of scarce resources, represented one of the most unsavory
developments in Africa’s development in the late 1970s and 1980s. And,
when these twin weaknesses are accompanied by a third phenomenon,
the degeneration of higher education in the continent, again in favor
of basic education, in the light of resource constraints (Assie-Lumumba,
2006), indebtedness and structural adjustment loans (SALs) with stiff
conditions, the continuing overall poor performance of the continent in
the years up to the turn of this century is understandable.
What the leading reforming countries have done, and these are not
necessarily the countries that are growing in double digits, but countries
whose national leaders or political environment have recognized the
need for change, is to articulate and begin to implement appropriate
policies and programs in these three areas. First, they are focusing sharply
on hard as well as soft infrastructures. Thus, for example, the govern-
ment of the Republic of South Africa has established a Development
Bank whose primary focus is to mobilize resources for hard and soft
infrastructures. Even though it is confronted by a declining economic
circumstance in view of its stronger linkages to the Eurozone, it has
also embarked on rebuilding the capacity of its public administration,
especially the higher civil service. Finally, RSA is allocating significant
resources to higher education. These three policy thrusts, together
with governance reforms and financial sector reforms, constitute the
core staple of reforms for countries in the region that are serious about
simultaneously rebuilding their civil services and achieving enhanced
economic performance.
South Africa’s incumbent Minister for Economic Planning, who
formerly had responsibility for managing the country’s finances, recently
summarized the ‘broad consensus across the political spectrum’ on the
need for a professional and competent civil service, and the principles
for developing such a service. According to him, the principles:
Table 6.4 Core reform elements required for revitalizing Africa’s civil services in
the 21st century
Key reform
elements Essential elements/ indicators
from one another in history, culture, orientation and stature which are
regarded as rapidly developing. This is true of the G20 and BRICs coun-
tries, and new research has provided vivid evidence of this (Acemoglu
and Robinson, 2012; Chang, 2003, 2010).
The above governance-cum-civil-service reform agenda would involve
struggle by the social forces within each country as they seek to trans-
form exclusive political and economic institutional arrangements into
inclusive ones. International development partners (both old ones such
as the IFIs and new ones such as nationals of Africa in diaspora who
have become important agents of financial intermediation and develop-
ment) would also need to ensure that they join the progressive forces
for change. The goal must be to re-create resilient civil service systems,
drawing on good practices that have worked in the continent in the
past combined with selected international good practices, which are
featured in Table 6.4 above. Resilient civil service systems help societies
to confront challenges and take advantage of opportunities to ensure
socio-economic progress irrespective of the challenges confronting them
in their environment.
Notes
1. In this chapter, Sub-Saharan Africa and Africa are used as synonyms. North
Africa is regarded as part of the Middle East, as is the practice in some interna-
tional organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank. However, there are references to North African countries in some parts
of the chapter.
2. Of course, commitment to the merit principle does not mean total lack of
attention to representativeness. Typically, there is attention to representation
in both old and new states, based on class (Britain), geographical area (France),
or racial or ethnic groups in heterogeneous societies such as Ethiopia, Nigeria
and South Africa in SSA.
3. The CPIA estimates a country’s governance based on 16-point criteria carried
out by the World Bank with the concurrence of the host country. It assesses
economic management (three elements), structural policies (three elements),
social inclusion policy (five elements) and public management and institu-
tions (five elements).
References
Acemoglu, Daron and J.A. Robinson (2012) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power,
Prosperity and Poverty (New York: Crown Publishers).
Adamolekun, L. (1986) Politics and Administration in Nigeria (London:
Heinemann).
112 Ladipo Adamolekun and Dele Olowu
1 Introduction
114
National Civil Service Systems in Western Europe 115
interaction (Marks, Hooghe and Blank, 1996; Scharpf, 2002; Van den
Berg, 2011). While as an analytical metaphor it was first coined in the
1990s, the governance of Western Europe has always been of a more of
less multi-level nature. Examples of layered government can be found
even in the oldest systems of government, and corporations and other
extra-governmentals have been involved in the dealings of administra-
tions at least since the 17th century (consider the church and guilds
as mediators and regulators of social life) (Toonen and Van der Meer,
2005). Indeed, the practice of multi-level governance long predated the
emergence of the analytical metaphor (Benz, 2003; Mayntz, 2004).
Having placed the novelty of multi-level governance somewhat in
perspective, this metaphor is useful since it makes us aware of the increasing
degree to which various tiers of government (local, regional, national,
European) and various types of actors and institutions (state, business,
organized interest, media) have come to share responsibilities and depend
on each other. The multi-level approach makes us aware of the comple-
mentary presence of non-hierarchical and non-legal provisions and of the
room for informal exchange and negotiated policy outcomes between and
among the various tiers of government (Peters and Pierre, 2004).
The question now is in what sense the increasingly multi-level nature
of governance influences national civil service systems. Since the 1920s,
Weber’s writings on bureaucratization have been the pre-eminent tool
for the analysis of bureaucracy. He analyzed the rationalization of social
life and the concurrent type of legal-rational rule. Within a system of
legal-rational rule public and private activities are best organized and
executed through bureaucratic organizations. Within these organiza-
tions tasks and responsibilities are coordinated by means of hierarchi-
cally ordered offices. These offices are filled by bureaucratic officials. By
making this distinction between three levels (system level: legal-rational
rule; meso-level: bureaucratic organization; and individual level: the
officeholder) we have a lever with which to identify and interpret the
potential changes related to increasing multi-level governance for civil
service systems.
120
100
80 The Netherlands
United Kingdom
60
France
40 Germany
20
0
1984 1987 1990 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005
mandate and having close political backing from the home govern-
ment are in most cases necessary conditions for success (Van den Berg,
2011: 385).
The increasing number of internationally active civil servants also
challenges coordination among national bureaucracies. System-wide
coordination is especially important in international arenas, since the
turbulence of multi-lateral negotiations can easily require adjustments
in bargaining strategies. Without a coherent and consistent political
agenda from national institutions, the risk of conflicting agendas, both
across governmental organizations and across policy sectors, becomes
pressing. Since multi-level governance means a larger number of actors
(besides national state actors) and a greater importance of different
centers of authority (besides the central state), established structures
and processes at the national level may have to be revised or transferred,
either to semi- or non-state bodies, or to supra- or subnational tiers
(Kohler-Koch and Eising, 1999: 13).
A number of studies suggest that in the decision-making process of
the EU, middle-ranking national officials seem to play a more impor-
tant role than top-level civil servants. Thus, European integration may
shift primary bureaucratic influence on policy making from the top
levels of civil service systems to middle-ranking civil servants (e.g. Page
and Jenkins,, 2005). While our findings clearly support the notion that
the bulk of EU-related activity is done at the middle ranks of the civil
service rather than at the top echelons, it is doubtful whether this signi-
fies any change from a less Europeanized past, in which most policy
formulation was also done at the middle-ranking level, and not at the
top (Van den Berg, 2011: 397).
Also, internationalization is expected to have implications for career
systems. Promotion, secondment, and outplacement to national repre-
sentations or to international organizations may add an extra dynamic
to established bureaucratic career structures. In France, the senior civil
service has quietly been able to fit the developing EU institutions into
its elitist corporate structure and modes of operating. Since temporary
secondment to other ministries, other sectors and other types of organi-
zations have been common practice among the members of the higher
corps, the addition of EU-related activities and postings has been a
relative matter of course. Indeed, it has created a sort of European club
within the top layers of the French civil service, just as there is an educa-
tion club, a financial club and an agricultural club. This club can be
understood as an informal network of about 1000 members of the upper
corps, consisting of senior civil servants who presently hold or in the
past held positions (a) within the Commission or other EU institutions;
120 Caspar van den Berg and Theo A.J. Toonen
3.2 Agencification
Agencification is the process in which national governments increas-
ingly delegate mainly implementation and regulatory activities to
national-level agencies that are either completely privatized, or operate
at arm’s length from the ministerial department and enjoy relative
autonomy, at least with respect to managerial affairs, but under the
direct political responsibility of a minister. Since the early 1980s most
Western states pursued some sort of agencification strategy, often as a
part of New Public Management (NPM)-inspired reforms (Van Thiel,
2005). It should not be overlooked, though, that patterns of semi- and
para-governmental governance of executive tasks existed for a long time
in continental European systems (Dijkstra and Van der Meer, 1997.
Besides purely domestic motives, agencification is also regarded as
an indication of internationalization. First, the inter- and transnational
nature of governance is a potential driving force behind agencification
(Christensen and Lægreid, 2005: 19). In a complex system of multi-level
governance, national executives need to be vigorous and efficient in
pursuing their goals, both in a strategic sense and in terms of tackling
substantial policy problems. Offloading some of their implementa-
tion and regulatory tasks (especially those that would otherwise bear
considerable political sensitivity) to agencies may be instrumental to
enhancing performance on their primary goals (Toonen, 2001).
Empirically we see that the national civil service in most countries has
become more decentralized in an organizational sense. That is, central
departments have shrunk in terms of tasks and size, and subsidiary
executive and regulatory organizations have either been established, or,
where they already existed, have been expanded. Across the systems of
France, the Netherlands and Britain, it is evident that tasks and staff
have been transferred from central departments to executive agen-
cies (on the largest scale in Britain); regulatory bodies have been set
up or have been given a more independent status vis-à-vis their parent
ministry; and tasks and – usually to a lesser extent – staff have been
transferred to regional field service or subnational authorities (on the
largest scale in France).2
It should be noted here that this process of fragmentation and diver-
sification of the previously more monolithic national civil service has
had a stronger impact where the civil service was more centralized to
begin with than in an already fragmented system. From its inception,
the Netherlands’ civil service system has been relatively fragmented,
which dampened the impact of this reform wave in this country. In
122 Caspar van den Berg and Theo A.J. Toonen
this sense, the civil service systems of the respective EU-member states
show a partial convergence: the changes are similar both in extent and
in direction, but depending on each country’ strain position, each coun-
try’s trajectory of change and adaptation, and endpoint, also differ, and
therefore mutual differences do not dissolve entirely (Van den Berg,
2011: 351).
Second, internationalization encouraged new forms of regulation
and the creation of ‘independent’ inspectorates (Christensen and
Lægreid, 2005; Hood et al., 2004). Where until the late 1970s regula-
tion and inspection used to be carried out by integrated sections within
the central bureaucracy, in an internationalized governance system a
stronger focus is put on re-institutionalizing the separation of powers,
that is, the formation of regulatory agencies and inspectorates outside
the central departmental structure. Ultimately, the more important
the role of supra- and transnational organizations in monitoring the
behavior of the national state, the higher the need for a national regu-
lation system that is high in credibility and legitimacy and therefore
independent and relatively autonomous from the central executive.
Thus, internationalization contributes to the fragmentation of bureau-
cratic structures.
Whether the power of the administrative heads of agencies is signifi-
cantly greater than the power of top bureaucrats in core ministries is a
question that cannot be answered in general terms. On the one hand,
top officials in agencies enjoy more managerial autonomy and, given the
difficulty of clearly separating managerial decisions and policy decisions,
the overall political control over top officials in agencies is generally
not as strict as in ministerial departments. On the other hand, political
leaders may see agencification also as an instrument to enhance their
grip on the civil service, for two reasons. By fragmenting large minis-
terial departments, they hope to regain some control over individual
units under their responsibility (Van der Meer, 2006, forthcoming).
Also, the creation of agencies mostly coincides with the introduction
of clearly formulated performance contracts that increase the degree of
ministerial control over the heads of agencies (Pollitt and Bouckaert,
2004: 144–146).
bureaucracy is now less useful than in the past for the comparative anal-
ysis of national civil service systems?
Following Page (1992), and taking the potential for bureaucratic domi-
nance as a central notion in Weber’s writings, we focus on the coun-
tering forces of a number of institutions: parliaments, interest groups,
political leadership, personal staff and the judiciary. We turn to each of
these pillars and institutions and assess their relevance or obsolescence
for present-day analysis.
The principle of hierarchy in organizing and coordinating the admin-
istrative apparatus has by no means become obsolete. However, in some
parts of the civil service, hierarchy is now complemented as a coordina-
tion principle by contractual market principles and networks (i.e. volun-
tary cooperation based on mutual dependence rather than hierarchy).
These mechanisms are primarily visible in those parts of the bureaucracy
that were established or reformed within a NPM-context (Pollitt and
Bouckaert, 2004: 82). In this sense, a differentiation is conceivable in
terms of the importance of hierarchy between the core departmental
organizations and the decentralized units.
Similarly, when looking at the much-debated erosion of professional
career patterns, a mixed picture emerges. On the one hand, in several
systems the debate about the normalization of the legal position of
the civil servant with the position of employees in the private sector is
reopened. This indicates that the distinctness of ‘serving the state’ is in
decline. Also, for a considerable share of the managerial offices (espe-
cially those in decentralized organs) in practically all Western states,
contracts become less permanent, more flexible, and in some cases
connected with specific performance targets. On the other hand, inter-
nationalization has opened an extra dimension to the career system,
perpetuating and perhaps reinforcing the existing principles of career
constitution (see on new career opportunities Caiden, 2006: 537–541).
Moreover, when trying to assess the degree to which the Weberian
principle of candidates being selected on the basis of technical qualifica-
tions and being appointed, reality shows variation. It appears that in the
more peripheral parts of the system technical qualifications are highly
valued. Most of the decentralized tasks and processes were intentionally
depoliticized when placed at arm’s length. Since these bodies deal with
technical rather than political issues, it is to be expected that they rely
more heavily on technically qualified staff than the core ministries.
These core ministries (especially at the higher levels) are more and
more exclusively in charge of strategic decision making. This requires
a more strategically minded and politically responsive staff for these
offices; promotion is less likely to be based on seniority, but rather on
128 Caspar van den Berg and Theo A.J. Toonen
5 Conclusion
Notes
1. In the survey, seven types of EU-related activities were distinguished: (1) prep-
aration of national input for EU-level meeting; (2) participation in working
groups for the Council of Ministers; (3) participation in meetings organized by
132 Caspar van den Berg and Theo A.J. Toonen
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8
Civil Service Reforms, Public
Service Bargains and Dynamics
of Institutional Change
Philippe Bezes and Martin Lodge
1 Introduction
136
Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains 137
been achieved (see Hood and Dixon, 2013). Indeed, it might also be
argued that the literature on civil service reform has shown only limited
interest in applying and assessing the underlying causal mechanisms
that have been put forward in the historical institutionalist literature
(Pierson, 2000, 2004; Streeck and Thelen, 2005; Thelen, 2003).
This chapter puts forward an institutional perspective on civil service
reform. The emphasis in this chapter is how trajectories of reform of
civil service systems are influenced by their interdependent and comple-
mentary institutional components. Civil service systems are inherently
‘path dependent’ owing to their robust institutional arrangements that
are, at times, entrenched in specific legal orders. Reforms are ‘embedded’
in the legacies of civil service systems: the key features of civil service
systems cannot be reversed easily.
We develop the historical institutional argument in four steps. First,
we develop an institutional perspective that highlights the interdepend-
ence of various aspects that define civil service systems. We do so by
relying on the concept of Public Service Bargains (Hood and Lodge,
2006; Lodge and Hood, 2012), highlighting the endogenous and exog-
enous dynamics that affect civil service systems. Second, we consider
the underlying causal mechanisms that are at the heart of the institu-
tional literature and discuss how these mechanisms have affected civil
service reform. Finally, we consider how an institutional perspective can
address some of the key questions in civil service reform.
is that any reform on one dimension will have direct implications for
other aspects of the Bargain: attempts at fiddling with rewards will have
implications not just in terms of motivation, but also for loyalty and
competency. Second, it highlights the importance of understanding
civil service reform as a process that involves formal reform announce-
ments and changes that are filtered by informal institutional conven-
tions and understandings. Third, it highlights that civil service reform is
a matter of mutual adjustment: it is about the demands and organization
of politics and party organizations (see Bezes, 2012) that interact with
the demands and expectations of civil servants. Fourth, Public Service
Bargains often come in numerous ways and there is not one nationally
distinct PSB.
However, some factors that generate degrees of national distinctive-
ness can be distinguished. In general, national distinctiveness relates
to issues of rule-boundedness and distinctiveness from other labor
markets. One key aspect is the way in which civil service systems have
been historically legally entrenched. For Weber the process of estab-
lishing a specific legal order facilitated political centralization and the
rise of rational-legal bureaucracy (Page, 1992: 19–24). Others, too, have
noted differences between Rechtsstaat and public interest type bureauc-
racies (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Some civil service systems are placed
in distinct systems of administrative law. The French case, for example,
is characterized by complex legal entrenchment that involves extensive
legal provisions that rule bureaucratic life, and the life of bureaucrats as
well (statut général des fonctionnaires). Scandinavian countries differ in
the extent to which a specific administrative law exists. Elsewhere, ordi-
nary courts may witness specialization effects in terms of a particular
‘chamber’ concentrating on administrative law cases.
A second feature generating national distinctiveness is the pervasive-
ness of one model of civil service across all spheres of bureaucracy. Put
differently, the notion of pervasiveness defines the degree to which
central governments possess central leverage over networks of power
(and thus types of civil services) (see Page, 1995: 259–261). Pervasiveness
points, for example, to the spatial distribution of civil service posts, the
‘division of labor’ and hierarchical relationships among public servants
across different levels of government. In short, pervasiveness is about the
historical trajectories of state building and the extent of administrative
centralization which, in turn, impacts on the existence (in number and
type) of different Public Service Bargains in a given state. Differences, for
example, exist as to the way in which different countries have tradition-
ally delivered public services. Sweden, for example, has historically relied
Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains 143
civil service advice becomes less important. These pressures are said
to be partly responsible for the emergence of the so-called New Public
Management (NPM) (Hood, 1991, 1995). NPM has become a global
label to characterize many, often contradictory elements associated
with ‘managerialism’ and ‘reform.’ However, broadly defined, NPM
has been about decreasing the distinctiveness of the public from the
private sector, and it is about reducing the rule-boundedness of public
sector behavior. Whatever the factors that led to the rise of doctrines
attached to the NPM label, the high tide of supposedly NPM-informed
reforms during the 1980s and 1990s has been seen by many as a crit-
ical juncture in that bureaucratic standard operating procedures were
challenged. More generally, civil service reform policy attracted higher
political salience and was therefore no longer processed within the
‘internal’ civil service networks.
However, the view that civil service reforms over the past three
decades should be understood as a radical departure, or as a critical junc-
ture, can also be challenged. It is difficult to identify one system which
fundamentally transformed its PSBs that would make them unrecogniz-
able to previous incarnations. Indeed, it could be argued that change
within PSBs has been far less extensive than changes to the ‘machinery
of government’ (i.e. the organizational arrangement of government), or
financial and budgetary systems. Three decades of civil service reform
have arguably led to an increase in the number of PSBs, and to some
gradual changes within PSBs, but not to their overall transformation
(Hood and Lodge, 2006). Identifiable changes have sought to introduce
greater flexibility (see Bach and Bordogna, 2011; Lægreid and Wise, this
volume; Moynihan, 2004). Growing flexibility is evident in the use of
fixed-term contracts, private-sector-style recruitment practices at all
levels of the civil service, an emphasis on performance management and
political responsiveness, and the reduction of formal statutory employ-
ment protections.
Many of these changes were already initiated in the 1960s and 1970s.
For example, Donald P. Moynihan shows that the US 1978 Civil Service
Reform Act can be seen as the basis for public management reform debates
in the US. Despite much anti-bureaucracy rhetoric, the Republican presi-
dencies under Reagan and George W. Bush did not succeed in eroding
the special employment status of federal employees (Bach and Kolins
Givan, 2011). Similarly, many of the UK reform themes that emerged
during the 1980s and 1990s could be seen as responding to the 1968
Fulton Report with its emphasis on removing internal departmental
boundaries and encouraging the development of a cross-departmental
Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains 145
At the same time, civil service systems are not static: PSBs are open
to challenge, misunderstandings and cheating. Certain aspects are
therefore more ‘mutable’ than others (Clemens and Cook, 1999); for
example, the promise of higher pay may lead civil servants to consent
to performance-pay systems that reduce their security of tenure. It is
difficult to envisage what the benefit of changes to competency require-
ments might be.
A second explanation as to why civil service reforms – especially at
the top – did not feature as prominently as other elements of wider
administrative reforms is that such reforms are likely to have negative
consequences in terms of trust and motivation. After all, politicians
require ‘enthusiastic’ civil servants, and thus might be averse to directly
challenging those working near to them. Besides, a challenge to employ-
ment rights is also likely to bring the wrath of trade unions. Given
such strong forces of resistance to major change, it is therefore hardly
surprising that political demands for reform focused on less resourceful
targets, and that civil service reform agendas focused mostly on adding
complexity to existing arrangements, rather than on thorough reform
per se. Politicians are likely to seek compromise with top bureaucrats to
push through reforms, which consequently end up being about status
reaffirmation (of civil servants at the top) and ‘defensive.’ In contrast,
politicians are unlikely to pursue ‘offensive’ strategies as this will merely
stir opposition (Bezes, 2001; Bordogna, 2008).
A third explanation is that civil service systems are informal insti-
tutions. As such, they rely on implicit knowledge and therefore make
reform ‘from the outside’ more difficult (Pierson, 2004: 24). At the same
time, informal institutions evolve as changes in wider society lead to
different expectations and understandings, for example, regarding the
importance of immaterial and material reward, the significance of status,
or the role of gender at the workplace. All of these wider changes have
direct implications on the way civil services operate. However, such
changes cannot be found in official reform announcements, but gradu-
ally emerge over time. An example of such gradual change is demo-
graphic profile, not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of the
considerable aging within European civil services. Systems that age, and
that therefore face considerable inter-generational replacement activity
during a relatively short period of time, will be challenged in their
informal understandings regarding collaboration and coordination, but
also in terms of institutional memory.
A promising way to approach civil service reform, therefore, is to
explore in more depth the causal mechanisms that are associated
Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains 147
Finally, ‘drift’ (Hacker, 2005; Mahoney and Thelen, 2010; Streeck and
Thelen, 2005: 24–26) characterizes a pattern of change where ‘rules
remain formally the same but their impact changes as a result of shifts
in external conditions’ (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010: 17). This mode of
change is related to the idea that although politicians or others may not
respond to environmental change, the external changes do change the
resources and effects of existing institutions. For example, demographic
change, the impact of climate change and the consequences of austerity
will have an impact on existing civil service systems, even though
formally no changes may have been forthcoming (so far). Furthermore,
the age of financial austerity, with its staff and wage freezes and squeezes,
is likely to have consequences on motivation, loyalty and competency,
even though no formal changes may have occurred in those areas (Lodge
and Hood, 2012; Vaughan-Whitehead, 2013).
and Lodge, 2004, 2005; Lodge and Hood, 2003). In the German case, a
number of debates regarding the competency and skills of civil servants
have been held since the early 1970s, but were repeatedly frustrated. For
example, in the 1970s competency was discussed while heated debates
were conducted about whether the German civil service was sufficiently
competent to deal with the complexities of the modern welfare state.
This debate died in the mid-1970s. The competency debate returned in
the 1980s, but was interrupted by the demands of unification. When
the Red–Green coalition returned to competency in its ‘activitating
state’ reform program, it again got ‘flooded away’ (the rising tides of
the river Elbe in 2002 led to reallocation of central resources away from
administrative reform and to crisis management). The German story,
however, is also one of departmental frameworks (given their constitu-
tional autonomy) as well as the continued importance given to subject
expertise as key feature of competency – rather than social aspects (such
as behavior) that had been long-standing features of German assessment
procedures.
In the British case, the language of competency in terms of ‘excelling
behaviors’ emerged in the 1990s (later than Germany or the US) and
at the time of the establishment of the Senior Civil Service (SCS). The
SCS was in itself a compromise between some politicians who sought to
establish a New Zealand-type contract system and those who wanted to
preserve the traditional ‘serial loyalist’ system. The SCS was to establish
(preserve) a ‘go anywhere’ elite. As a result, competency was defined in
ways that resembled those of a typical go-anywhere Whitehall bureau-
crat rather than in terms of a German ‘subject expertise’ emphasis or
a managerial understanding of competence in the sense of minimal
standards that had been applied by the top public servants to the rest of
the public sector throughout the 1980s.
Other examples can be taken from the loyalty dimension of the PSB.
In Belgium, the Copernic reform, launched after the 1999 elections,
was said to redefine the relationship between ministers and civil serv-
ants. First of all, it replaced tenure by fixed-term contracts for the three
upper grades of the hierarchy. Furthermore, it also sought to reduce the
political influence during the recruitment process by introducing an
appointment process based on a comparative selection procedure oper-
ated by an independent public sector recruitment agency (de Visscher
and Salomonsen, 2013; de Visscher, Hondeghem et al., 2011). However,
political parties have resisted these reforms and party-political criteria
are still said to play an important role.
Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains 151
low power and low remuneration in exchange for instability and higher
risk’ (Ongaro, 2009: 165).
In contrast, Westminster systems such as New Zealand faced limited
formal resistance (Boston et al., 1991). Equally in Britain, the introduc-
tion of executive agencies was facilitated not only by strong political will
(and opportunities) but also by top civil servants and widespread institu-
tional fragmentation within the British core executive (Hogwood, 1993).
Managerialist ideas have been said to find more resonance in bureaucra-
cies like the UK where public servants’ loyalty is directed towards their
political master (‘the government of the day’) instead of something
more abstract, such as a constitution (Hood and Lodge, 2006; see also
Hondeghem and Steen, 2013). In some ways, the observed changes in
Anglo-Saxon civil service systems could be seen as ‘path-dependent’ in
that they extended and reformulated the traditional ‘professional orien-
tation’ that ‘takes advantages of the existing high social and economic
incentives for individuals to take on professional training and roles’
(Silberman, 1993: 13). Similarly, the distinctly ‘decentralized’ tone of
NPM-inspired reforms in Scandinavia has been linked to the pre-existing
emphasis on delegated authority (Christensen and Lægreid, 2002). As
argued by Jon Pierre (2004), the Social Democrat reform program was
mostly concerned with ensuring loyalty and compliance. Changes were
therefore tied to the inherited structures that also allowed, since the
1990s, for a growing politicization of agency appointments.
national civil service systems have not become alike. A second response,
however, is to suggest that national distinctiveness should not be over-
emphasized. There are common challenges that confront national civil
services, and there are considerable varieties within national civil service
systems that blur, to an extent at least, the degree of national distinctive-
ness. Indeed, an emphasis on informal institutions also highlights that
formal provisions can be ‘stretched’ in the light of changing expecta-
tions and understandings.
A second theme that emerges from an institutional argument is
that contemporary reforms have led to growing hybridity and diver-
sification. Civil service roles are usually about dealing with sometimes
competing logics of action (i.e. a managerial and a professional logic of
action). Therefore hybridity is not that surprising. However, what can
be observed is that different PSBs within national systems develop in an
interactive and responsive way. In some cases, the hybridization process
has been complexified by the fact that so-called neo-managerial reforms
have led to the return of some ‘bureaucratic’ tools. For example, the
extensive reforms in the New Zealand civil service established a formal
arrangement that the State Services Commission was to act as employer
of civil servants and assess their performance, therefore supposedly
safeguarding the ‘neutrality’ of the civil service. Similarly, the greater
prominence of ‘outsiders’ in the British core executive (in the form of
spin doctors, special advisors and civil service outsiders recruited into
the civil service) since 1997 has triggered the countervailing devel-
opment of greater codification and boundary controls between civil
service and party-political work for ‘normal’ civil servants. More gener-
ally, some scholars have emphasized trends towards centralization of
human resources management of the civil service, specifically for top
bureaucrats in France and the UK (Gally, 2012) or more globally for HR
functions (Truss, 2008). Growing diversification, and complexification,
generated scope for misunderstandings and conflict. These, in turn, trig-
gered further calls for civil service reforms, by politicians and civil serv-
ants alike.
A third theme is whether contemporary civil service system reforms
have witnessed growing ‘politicization’ (Eichbaum and Shaw, 2008,
2010; Mair et al., 2012; Peters and Pierre, 2004). David Lewis (2008, 2012)
has noted not just how politicization in terms of number of appoint-
ments has actually declined in number since the 1980s (in the US), but
also that the extent of political appointment in an agency is detrimental
to that agencies’ performance. Elsewhere, too, civil service watchers have
sought to develop an understanding as to whether civil services have
Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains 155
6 Conclusion
This chapter has advanced two arguments. First, national civil service
systems are not simple constructs that are likely to respond in similar
ways to exogenous pressures. Instead, what has emerged are patterns
of different institutional configurations that consist of interdependent,
often complementary components. Civil service systems have not been
‘designed,’ but have evolved over time, in a process that resembles
layering, displacement and drift effects, as suggested by the historical
institutionalist literature. This chapter has argued that the causal mech-
anisms that have been identified by the historical institutionalist litera-
ture have a critical impact on the way in which civil service systems
evolve. In particular, we have argued that the discussion of reform
therefore also needs reconsideration. States are not in the same ‘reform
race’ (Hood and Lodge, 2005), but are engaged in dealing, in their varied
ways, with responses to peculiar side-effects arising from their distinct
PSBs and with common challenges that affect civil service systems more
generally, such as demographic change, austerity and climate change.
The second argument is that taking as a starting point the three compo-
nents of the PSB (career, competencies, loyalty) and the two modes of
variations (entrenchment and pervasiveness) should allow for consid-
erable scope for extensive comparative research. Using the conceptual
tools developed in institutional analysis allows for a more theoretically
informed analysis of both reproduction and change (Thelen, 2003).
We have pointed to the importance of looking not only at the various
components on their own as ‘opportunity structures,’ but also across
all five components. Civil service systems therefore emerge as complex,
non-linear, partly loosely coupled, partly tightly coupled systems that
have their own particular vulnerabilities and reform opportunities.
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Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains 157
1 Introduction
162
Public Service Systems at Subnational and Local Levels 163
The nature of local public service systems is not only linked with the
nature of public employment and civil service systems but also with
specific features of local government systems. Local personnel struc-
tures and public servants’ qualifications largely depend on the local
governments’ functional responsibilities. Furthermore, state–local inter-
action and the position of state authorities in relation to local authori-
ties strongly account for local governments’ weight within total public
employment. Territorial boundaries of the local system determine to a
large extent local functional ‘viability’ and thereby likewise local public
service structures and functioning. Therefore, we first provide a brief
overview of the three local government systems before examining and
comparing their specific local personnel structures.
Territorial structure
11,161 municipalities 26 regions England: Two-tier system: 27 counties,
107 ‘county-free’ cities 100 départements 201 (non-metropolitan) districts, Greater
295 counties 36,767 municipalities London: GLA + 32 boroughs and the City of
London; one-tier system: 36 metropolitan
districts, 56 other unitary authorities
Wales: 22 unitary authorities
Scotland: 32 unitary authorities
Northern Ireland: 26 district councils
Differences between the Länder Myriad of tiny communes (1754 Large administrative units (counties: 760,000
Nordrhein-Westfalen: 396 municipalities with on inhabitants on average) inhabitants, districts: 102,000 inhabitants
average 44,329 inhabitants 90 percent of all communes have less than on average)
Rheinland-Pfalz: 2306 municipalities with on 2000 inhabitants ‘Viable’ (partly over-sized) structures
average 1730 inhabitants Territorial fragmentation
Functional responsibilities/administrative structures
Communes as ‘multi-function’/ ‘all-purpose’ Communes with marginal functions Local authorities as ‘multi-function’/‘all-
institutions Predominance of the state (also in local purpose’ institutions (tradition of ‘dual
Integration of state and local self-administrative self-administration tasks) polity’)
tasks Many ‘deconcentrated’ (single-purpose) Few single-purpose state agencies at the local
Few single-purpose state agencies state authorities at the local level level
(95 percent of the state personnel) Comprehensive mandate in delivering social
services (‘municipal empires’)
Type of local government****
North Middle European Group Franco-Group Anglo-Group
* Source: Federal Statistical Office data: December 31, 2013. ** Source: http://www.collectivites-locales.gouv.fr/files/files/Publication_globale%281%29.pdf (March 25,
2014). *** Source: Kuhlmann and Wollmann (2014). **** According to Hesse and Sharpe (1991).
166 Sabine Kuhlmann, Sylvia Veit and Jörg Bogumil
numerous other local tasks for a long time. However, the traditional
‘ultra vires’ doctrine has been considerably attenuated under the
banner of ‘new localism,’ as proclaimed by the New Labour govern-
ment. This was first embarked on by the Local Government Act 2000
according to which local authorities were endowed with the task ‘to
promote the economic, social and environmental well-being of their
areas’ (cf. Wilson and Game, 2011: 32. With the explicit political goal
of strengthening local self-government, the Conservative–Liberal
coalition that was formed in May 2010 adopted the Localism Act on
November 15, 2011. This granted local authorities a ‘general power of
competence’ tantamount to a general competence clause (Kuhlmann
and Wollmann, 2014).
Table 9.2 Local public employment, general public employment and general
employment in country-comparative perspective 2012/2013
Source: Translation of Statistisches Bundesamt*Figures for 2012 (June 30), Source: Federal
Statistical Office. ** Figures for 2012; including regions, départements, communes,
intermunicipal cooperation bodies (EPCI), établissements publics locales; http://www.
fonction-publique.gouv.fr/files/files/statistiques/stats-rapides/Stats-rapides-emploi-12–2012.
pdf; http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_Explained/index.php?title=File:Employed_
persons_number,employment_rates_and_share_of_part-time_Employment,_by_sex,_2012_
V2.png&filetimestamp=20130531091300 *** Figures for 2013 (second quarter); Source: Office
National Statistics, own calculations.
Public Service Systems at Subnational and Local Levels 169
English sixth form college corporations from the public to the private
sector in 2012. Hence, there was little change in the UK over the past
decade. Taking into consideration that the quota amounted to roughly
28 percent at the beginning of the Thatcher era (1981), it becomes clear
that the decrease of public employment in the UK and Germany was
about the same (roughly one-third of the public sector workforce was
cut down); the reduction process just started earlier in the UK (1980s)
than in Germany (1990s).
in fact considerably increased during the past decades, which the Sénat
critically referred to as a ‘quantitative invalidation of the statut system’
at the local level of government (Sénat, 2014: 2).
In all three countries conspicuous peculiarities can be observed
concerning the local status profiles and developments that support the
theory of local public service constituting a specific subsystem of public
employment. Local governments have been the front-runners in chal-
lenging and reforming traditional status profiles, while national legisla-
tors as well as state public services showed resistance.
* Without German Länder. Data for 1990/1991 and 2000/2001: Kuhlmann and Röber (2006);
data for 2012: Statistisches Bundesamt (2014) and dbb (2014). ** http://www.fonction-
publique.gouv.fr/files/files/statistiques/stats-rapides/Stats-rapides-emploi-12–2012.pdf;
Direction Générale des collectivités locales and DESL (2004, 2005, 2006). *** Source: Office
National Statistics http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pse/public-sector-employmen.
Public Service Systems at Subnational and Local Levels 177
These shifts reveal that the convergent neo-liberal trend did not lead
to the same cuts in all European local public service systems. While the
German local and Länder public service has decreased in size and the
traditionally strong German model of local self-administration appears
to be questioned, in the meantime the former Jacobin state of France
has created strong local administrative bodies, at least where personnel
weight is concerned. In the UK the neo-liberal and increasingly central-
istic reform initiatives of the government have an impact on a shrinking
local employment sector threatening the traditionally strong British
local government model.
Regarding the internal structures of local public service systems and
methods of human resource management, some remarkable changes
occurred. In all three countries the New Public Management (NPM)-
inspired approach of performance-oriented public sector moderniza-
tion has produced significant impacts on the local public service, yet in
different ways.
In Germany, the NPM-guided ‘New Steering Model’ (Neues
Steuerungsmodell – NSM; see Bogumil and Kuhlmann, 2004; Kuhlmann,
2004), which spread over the local landscape in the 1990s, was directed
at modernizing the traditional methods of human resource manage-
ment (i.e. inflexible, bureaucratic and completely lacking performance
incentives). New instruments and procedures were required that would
ensure a flexible employment practice as well as adequately support and
challenge the local employees’ capabilities. According to the findings of
a comprehensive research project on NSM evaluation in German local
authorities (see Bogumil and Kuhlmann, 2006; Bogumil et al., 2007;
Kuhlmann, Bogumil and Grohs, 2008),9 innovative elements of human
resource management have indeed increasingly been tested at the local
level. Sixty-two percent of the mayors stated that appraisal interviews
have been implemented, 56 percent report on elements of teamwork,
47 percent of confidential reports and 35 percent of new methods of
selection. Performance-related pay was introduced at local level in
2007,10 starting with 1 percent of monthly pay. It is intended that up
to 8 percent of a public servant’s salary relates to individual perform-
ance. Since acceptance for payment differences in the public service in
Germany still is low, performance-related payments are usually distrib-
uted broadly among local employees (Schmidt, Müller and Trittel, 2011).
Thus, in most cases there is no active implementation of performance-
related pay as a human resource strategy, but a rather slow and incre-
mental implementation (Jörges-Süß and Süß, 2011). At Länder level,
performance-related human resource management was not a core issue
178 Sabine Kuhlmann, Sylvia Veit and Jörg Bogumil
of public sector reform over recent decades. However, there are some
efforts to strengthen human resource management as a result of demo-
graphic change and budget restrictions. Performance-related pay has
been introduced successfully for some groups of public servants such as
university professors, but does not play any greater role for most parts of
Länder administrations, e.g. ministerial civil servants, school teachers or
policemen. Since the reform of federalism modernization efforts in the
Länder public service systems have been diversified.
The debate on performance-related human resource management also
gained ground in France. The system of increments according to the
seniority principle (ancienneté) and the lump sum granting of extra pay
(local allowance, family allowance, and so on) without any relation to
individual performance are in the spotlight of criticism claiming that
the egalitarian salary and pay system (gestion égalitaire) that evolved
over decades must be complemented by performance-related elements.
Meritocratic appraisal procedures (Bodiguel, 2004: 164) are required
which would allow public managers to distinguish between good and bad
performance. Basically, a three-stage payments system is arrogated with a
uniform basic pay (traitement de base) for all employees belonging to the
same salary group. Second, a supplement in relation to the specific func-
tion or position would be granted (complément lié à l’emplois occupé) and
third, a performance-related pay (complément indemnitaire de rendement/
prime de service) would be available. In order to determine the perform-
ance-related pay, appraisal interviews between the employee and his or
her superior were suggested. Yet, it must be recalled that French civil
service law already stipulated appraisal interviews (entretien d’évaluation)
20 years ago, although the debate on the performance-related pay got
momentum later (cf. Lemmet and Creignou, 2002: 73). A compulsory
‘evaluation/grading’ (notification) of the public servants’ professional
skills (valeur professionelle) by their superiors – ranging from grade 1 to
grade 20 – was already fixed in the mid-1980s. Local employers can thus
refer to these already existing instruments of personnel review when
dealing with new performance-related evaluation measures.
Comparing the three countries, there can, however, be little doubt
that in the UK performance management plays the most important
role in reforming local public service. This does not only apply to the
widespread (and often criticized) debate on performance-related pay,
but in particular to the (even more criticized) approaches of meas-
uring and controlling local government performance on the basis of
mainly centrally defined performance indicators that are checked by
central government auditors and inspectors. Over the last one and a
Public Service Systems at Subnational and Local Levels 179
5 Conclusion
Our findings give support to the assumption that the local public service
constitutes a relatively distinct system of public employment. It does not
only carry a substantial weight of the public workforce but is, above all,
an important pillar and backbone of the entire politico-administrative
system at national and supranational levels. A capable and viable as well
as politically accountable local self-government appears to be a decisive
precondition for the functioning of the entire democratic order. Against
this background current reform initiatives in the OECD world have been
directed towards transferring responsibilities, resources and powers from
upper to lower tiers of government, thereby further strengthening the
180 Sabine Kuhlmann, Sylvia Veit and Jörg Bogumil
local level. These reform strategies are necessary and, moreover, seem to
be promising, taking into account that in many countries local govern-
ments are also the forerunners of public sector modernization. This may
on the one hand be due to the more urgent (also financial) problems
and pressures at reform. On the other hand it seems also to be related
to the attributes and dedications of the local personnel acting in a more
flexible way with reform instruments and behaving in a more prag-
matic and output-oriented manner than is the case at other political
and administrative levels. This behavior, again, results from the imme-
diate proximity to the local arena, to local problems and to the citizens.
Success and failure of public sector reforms thus largely depend on the
degree to which local government is involved and may expect to benefit
or not from these reform measures. The above-mentioned cuts that the
local public services in Germany and the UK suffered in the course of
the NPM reform, EU liberalization and national budgetary crises appear
to be precarious setbacks. They conspicuously contradict the ongoing
trend of devolution and decentralization in Europe (cf. Stoker, 1991:
7; Vetter and Kersting, 2003: 16) which was described here for France.
From a more ‘normative’ point of view we would thus finally plead for
a design and direction of public sector reform appropriate to further
and reinforce local government’s pivotal position within the politico-
administrative system. From the more ‘scientific’ perspective we suggest
that future administrative research should take up the challenge to put a
greater analytical emphasis on the subnational and local levels of public
service systems and thus to fill this ‘missing link’ in comparative public
administration research.
Notes
1. We use the term ‘public service system’ instead of ‘civil service system’ in order
to distinguish it from the concept of ‘civil service’ which primarily refers to
central government personnel (see Bekke, Perry and Toonen, 1996: 1).
2. Accordingly, the German model resembles partially the British territorial
system (northern parts of Germany) and partially the French model (southern
and eastern Länder).
3. We leave aside here the ‘political profile’ of local governments because it is not
in the immediate focus of this article.
4. This traces back to the tradition of ‘dual polity,’ according to which local
employees are explicitly not regarded as being ‘civil servants.’
5. With the reform of federalism in 2006, a more clear-cut division of compe-
tences between the Federation and the Länder was aspired to and the Länder
got some new lawmaking competences, but this did not change the basic
institutional architecture of the German federalism.
Public Service Systems at Subnational and Local Levels 181
6. However, the range of diversity is hitherto not very large, owing to (1) consti-
tutional rules (Art. 33, paragraph 5 GG), (2) the restricting jurisprudence of
the Federal Constitutional Court, which is interpreting the general princi-
ples of the civil service law very traditionally, (3) the right of the federal
legislature to define fundamental rights and obligations of all civil servants
(but not remuneration, pension rules, etc.), and (4) voluntary coordination
between the Länder in order to prevent barriers to horizontal and vertical
personnel turnover in the German public service (Wolff, 2011).
7. The ‘indirect public service’ (mittelbarer öffentlicher Dienst) is not included.
8. Without the city-states of Hamberg, Bremen and Berlin (Ministerium der
Finanzen Sachsen-Anhalt, 2013: 16).
9. The project was supported by the Hans-Böckler-Foundation (duration:
2004–2006). In spring 2005 a survey in 1565 municipalities altogether has
been conducted, including all mayors and heads of county administration
(Landräte) as well as all staff councils’ chairmen. The survey is representative
for all German municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants.
10. §18, TVöD-VKA (Tarifvertrag Öffentlicher Dienst für den Bereich der kommunalen
Arbeitgeberverbände).
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Public Service Systems at Subnational and Local Levels 183
1 Introduction
Although you would not know it from the amount of academic atten-
tion they attract, senior civil servants do not account for the totality
of civil service ‘policy makers’ (for an overview of recent comparative
studies of the civil service see Horton, 2011). The terms ‘senior’ or ‘top’
and ‘policy makers’ are extremely imprecise. We do not have a ready
way of defining which particular civil servants are and are not involved
in making ‘policy’: all employees make decisions of some sort, but not
necessarily of the kind that political scientists would consider policy
decisions, whether because they are humdrum detail or the ‘imple-
mentation’ decisions of ‘street level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980). To
define anyone as a policy maker as opposed to being involved in policy
development raises further problems of definition. Numbers of those
described as ‘top’ civil servants can range from several dozen to several
hundreds even for the same country depending on how many ranks or
grades one decides to include in the definition (see Halligan, 2012: 116).
Moreover, while scholars make efforts to offer comparable definitions of
‘senior’ in different countries (see the essays in Page and Wright, 1999),
one recent attempt to define it conceded that it was unable to offer one
and settled for a ‘compromise’ (see Kuperus and Rode, 2008). So it is not
possible to say with any confidence how small or large a proportion of
civil servants who are involved in policy making fall into the category of
‘senior.’ Whether all of those who are in the very senior grades are policy
makers, and how many of those below the very top grades fall into this
category are also moot points.
We can point to a range of features of policy making that suggest that
significant portions of the action in shaping policy involve officials who
185
186 Edward C. Page
least blame avoidance, that can come from delegating even the most
politically sensitive decisions to others (for a discussion of blame avoid-
ance see Hood, 2010). In the sense that senior officials and politicians
decide what is to be delegated and how, they are still in charge, much
like the ‘policy-pay grade’ approach in this respect. Delegation is about
‘deliberate discretion’: consciously allocating some powers to others for
when it suits the politicians to do so and keeping hold of the issues or
types of decision politicians care most about and do not trust others to
handle (Huber and Shipan, 2002).
The delegation approach places much importance on the contract or
terms under which powers are delegated (see Krause, 2010 for a review
of this approach). In particular, such terms can include clear guidance
on how the decisions are to be taken and upon the procedural rules
that have to be observed when they are taken. Such procedural rules
help ensure compliance with the principal’s wishes where the guidance
is unclear or is being ignored. ‘Deck stacking’ are procedural rules that
mean that some groups – the ones that are more likely to share the views
of the political principals – are given some say in how this discretion
is exercised, ensuring that the decisions of think are likely to support
the intentions of the principal. Norms of consultation with interest
groups are common examples of such rules. If particular groups, say
those representing manufacturing industry, have to be consulted, they
are being offered in principle a chance to help shape the policy and the
deck is stacked in their favor. ‘Fire alarms,’ procedures that trigger the
attention of the principals and force them to review and possibly over-
ride the actions of the agents (McCubbins, Noll and Weingast, 1987).
Instead of the principals having to monitor everything their agents do
(the ‘police patrols’ version of principal supervision), they can concen-
trate on issues that are explicitly brought to their attention as problem-
atic. A rule that requires senior political or official approval for decisions
contested by other agencies or by interest groups would constitute such
a ‘fire alarm.’
Both the delegation and policy-pay grade approaches tend further
to make the assumption that relationships between politicians and/
or senior officials on the one hand and less elevated officials on the
other are latently adversarial. Left to their own devices, junior bureau-
crats ‘when making decisions will attempt to maximize their own values
to the extent possible’ (Meier and Hawes, 2009: 273). Similarly, for the
delegation theorist, the inherent tendency of bureaucrats to shirk – to
produce outcomes that might favor their own interests and preferences
rather than those of their political principal – is constrained by the
Middle-level Officials and Policy 189
The assumptions we make about officials below the very top ranks who
are involved in policy are based upon a range of conjectures about their
work: how it is organized, what it involves and how they go about it.
These conjectures are more often based on guesswork and surmise than
any observation of what these officials do. The work of policy officials
below the top levels has attracted some more attention in recent years,
and we can explore the assumptions using empirical evidence (even
though it is not rich and voluminous) from recent studies. I will be espe-
cially relying on my own recent studies of the policy work of middle-level
officials in Britain (Page, 2001, 2003, 2009; Page and Jenkins, 2005) and
in France, Germany, Sweden, the US, Britain and the EU (Page, 2012).
earlier study (Page, 2012: 148–150) classified them into three groups:
truly minor (8), moderate significance (29) and truly major (15). Of the
15 truly major decrees, politicians showed a close degree of involvement
in 10; of the 29 intermediate decrees they took a significant interest
in 6; and they tool a significant interest in none of the 8 truly minor
decrees.
The evidence on involvement in different types of policy making
broadly supports the idea that middle-ranking bureaucrats are less likely
to be left on their own and more likely to be supervised by politicians on
more important issues, so this aspect of the pay grade-policy approach
is also supported. But even here there is a significant qualification.
One-third of major issues, on this measure, were handled without any
significant direct involvement of politicians over and above the consent
that they must give to such measures (discussed further below). Thus in
questions such as the protection of a certain species of salmon under
protected habitats legislation and significant changes to the regulations
governing work permits in the US, the direct involvement of politicians
was slight and much of the policy development took place at levels well
below the top of the relevant agencies. Moreover, even where the politi-
cians were involved, the kind of direction they offered was not sustained
over the whole process and tended to focus on very limited aspects of
the policy being developed. The pay grade-policy approach points to
a tendency, to be sure, but it still leaves significant amounts of largely
unsupervised policy-making activity to ranks below the top of the civil
service.
There are other reasons to question the pay grade-policy argument
insofar as it points to a diminished role for bureaucrats below the top.
One is what might be termed an accumulation effect: lots of relatively
small decisions, possibly attracting little political or senior attention,
can shape policy areas. Jones and Bishop (1990) show how significant
changes are in anti-discrimination policy, in this case in questions of
segregating children with AIDS within the school system. The process
they describe is the interaction between agency regulators responding
to lower court decisions on earlier regulations to produce a policy in this
area without any clear political initiative. As they suggest:
the rights of racial minorities in the 1960s, and the rights of women
in the 1970s, so also did the courts protect the rights of persons with
AIDS in the late 1980s. (Jones and Bishop, 1990: 284)
Even in the US case, where the designation of a team and team leader
to take the rule forward resulted from discussions among senior staff in
the EPA, the internal staff and in particular the HR department allocated
responsibility largely based on judgments on perceived ‘experience.’
That the allocation in this comparative study bears little resemblance
to a conscious act of delegation is further supported by their observation
that ‘the legislatures in both countries were unwilling to spell out how a
reporting program should operate. Therefore, they passed vague legisla-
tion and required the agencies to make this decision’ (Cook and Rinfret,
2014: 9). Of course, the idea that politicians can avoid blame by failing
to specify details of policies or programs that are likely to attract some
unpopularity might be entirely consistent with a delegation concept,
offering ‘deliberate discretion’ (Huber and Shipan, 2002) in areas where
Middle-level Officials and Policy 193
3.3 Procedural rules make sure that politicians and senior officials
keep decision making in check
The central notion of the principal-agent and delegation perspectives is
that without some form of supervision, bureaucrats will shirk: they will
follow their own preferences and subvert or act in a manner that will
run counter to the preferences of those of the politician (see Brehm and
Gates, 1997). Direct supervision of bureaucratic work (police patrols),
such as by politicians scrutinizing or setting up some form of parallel
supervisory organization, is costly, so less direct procedural rules (fire
alarms) are more likely to be used, such as the requirement that interests
be consulted; forewarned groups can then seek to secure political support
in defeating unwanted bureaucratic proposals (McCubbins et al., 1987).
The evidence from the study of middle-level officials does not entirely
support this assumption. In the comparative study of decrees, as well as
in the analysis of ‘policy work’ in the UK, there is a remarkable similarity
in the accepted procedure for developing decrees: that politicians need
194 Edward C. Page
politicians, when they come to setting out the way in which bureau-
crats should operate when implementing the legislation that politicians
construct, build in particular triggers that ensure that shirking or poten-
tial shirking is brought to their attention. Indeed, the linked notion
of ‘deck stacking’ suggests that the triggers are particularly sensitive to
exposing actions that are opposed to politicians’ original intentions.
Thus fire alarms are controllable and controlled. A general norm is not.
It is not only the controllability and distinctiveness of the conditions
under which politicians are informed of what is being done in their
name in the bowels of the bureaucracy that is unrealistically exagger-
ated by conceiving of self-disclosure as discriminating fire alarms, but
the whole mechanism and what motivates bureaucrats in particular is
misrepresented. The suggestion is that bureaucrats, unless contained by
the constraints of fire alarms written into policies or procedural rules,
would not do the politicians’ bidding or seek to follow the intentions
of politicians. As we will see below, this is to give a highly misleading
picture of how middle-level bureaucrats work.
behave, like the Forest Rangers of Kaufman’s (1960) study as if they were
being constantly supervised. However, the most significant reasons for
this largely (but not invariably; see Page, 2012: 117–118) conformist
behavior is likely to have little to do with fear of punishment from
stepping out of line because the lines are rarely drawn with anything
approximating clarity.
Instead we must look to the professional norms and expectations
of bureaucratic life. In most countries the job of being a policy civil
servant, especially one below the very top ranks, carries with it a range
of expectations: observation of procedural propriety, compliance with
existing laws and constraints, avoidance of vetoes, clearance of sensitive
work with administrative and/or political superiors, the avoidance of
time-wasting on proposals and ideas that can never see the light of day
because of high-level political antipathy, the anticipation of politicians’
wishes and the search for cues about how to turn often vague statements
of intent into firm and valid rules and programs. To fill such expecta-
tions and thus fulfill one’s task as a civil servant leaves far less room for
the exercise of discretion aimed at gratifying individual self-interest or
personal policy preferences, especially where the subjects being dealt
with are rarely, if at all, directly linked to such interests or preferences.
While the world of middle-ranking civil servants is indeed a world
of creativity, it is a world of creativity bounded by many constraints.
Paradoxically, the larger the number of constraints can mean the greater
the creativity as officials have to show greater resourcefulness in forging
policies that achieve the purposes that they want them to serve. One
of the most important constraints is imposed by consideration of what
the political leadership of the organization that employs them wants
or is prepared to tolerate. It is in this highly bounded sense that we can
understand middle-level bureaucrats as policy makers. Their decisions
and choices can and often do make very big differences to the shape of
policies as much of the details about how a policy is to work in prac-
tice is left to them. Their policy-making role can even extend to policy
initiation for sensitive political issues (see Page, 2012). Yet in these and
the less sensitive cases what they do by way of policy making is always
contingent upon the perception or confirmed receipt of acquiescence or
support from the top.
5 Conclusion
Much of the language we use to describe how policies come into being
and develop tends to view policy as the result of an act of creation:
Middle-level Officials and Policy 199
not only the words ‘policy making’ itself but also words commonly
used such as ‘policy/decision maker,’ ‘key actors,’ ‘venue’ and ‘agenda’
emphasize the idea that policies are made in a defined place at a defined
time by a group of people. The whole language of policy making in this
way is something of a heuristic. Few can doubt that, say, the notion that
policy making can be conceived of as a business meeting has proved
useful through the notion of the agenda and agenda setting. Indeed, to
make sense of the policy process and, more importantly, to render it as
readable and attractive prose, it might be important that we deem it to
conform to the Aristotelian classical unities of action, time and place.
Because we seek to render policy comprehensible through such heuris-
tics we tend to emphasize the role of a manageable number of people
and processes, and this naturally tends to focus on decisions taken at
the top of the politico-administrative hierarchy (Kingdon, 2003: 31).
The policy role of senior officials in all this is conventionally construed
as shaping policy by ‘offering advice’ to politicians; ‘as policy advisers
they are in a very powerful position to influence or even create policy’
(Dowding, 1995: 108).
Policy making and development is far more ramshackle than this
heuristic suggests; indeed it is the purpose of heuristics to simplify such
messy reality. Nevertheless, in creating heuristics we may have piled too
much on to the senior civil servant. In fact, our knowledge of what top
officials do in their everyday jobs is rather limited to few studies (Kaufman,
1981; Rhodes, 2011), and from them it is apparent that dealing with
specifics of policy is not at all common. At what stage the very top offi-
cials become involved in policy development, and we can suspect what
they add to it. We know that much policy development takes place well
out of the gaze of officials at the top and can suspect that the observation
in Britain that the ‘departmental court’ of senior bureaucrats ‘does not
decide policy’ and ‘may not exercise much influence over the substance
of any policy’ (Rhodes, 2009: 444) might point to a wider truth about the
upper reaches of politico-administrative systems in other countries. The
bland formulation of top bureaucrats influencing through ‘giving advice’
to political leadership on policy is shown especially clearly to be inad-
equate when we consider the role of middle-grade officials who develop
policies on which senior officials have not advised anybody.
Perhaps more importantly for the comparative study of bureaucracies,
the focus of studies of the role of senior officials has been on their rela-
tionship with politicians. Whether or not the conclusions as regard the
power or influence of top officials have been impressive, the ambition
of much writing has been to elaborate on this relationship. Almost no
200 Edward C. Page
attention has been devoted to the relationship between the top levels
of the bureaucracy and the middle-levels that do most of the heavy
lifting in putting policies together. We might expect this relationship
to be at least as variable, if not more so, as that between politicians and
top officials. An important function of the cabinet in France is that it
enables a small group around the minister to keep close contact with
those lower down in the bureaucracy who develop policy, and even
take over detailed policy development where it wishes; this contrasts
with the absence of such developed routines for interaction between
the top and lower down in the UK and the routinized procedures of
communication in Germany (Page, 2012). How senior officials manage
lower-level officials and the opportunities they have for intervening
in and shaping the everyday activities of constructing policies appears
likely to have a significant effect on the influence of senior officials on
policy.
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11
Transitions in Civil Service
Systems: Robustness and Flexibility
in Human Resource Management
Per Lægreid and Lois Recascino Wise
1 Introduction
Over the past two decades, the notion of the distinctiveness of the public
sector as a ‘model employer’ has been fragmenting (Lægreid and Wise,
2007). Macro forces and the dissemination of reform ideas appear to
have contributed to a rethinking of the notion of the uniqueness of the
civil service and to the weakening of conditions of employment for civil
servants in many countries. Nowadays, the notion that the public sector
warrants a distinctive internal labor market system is no longer obvious.
Not only have the domain and responsibilities of civil servants changed,
as others in this volume describe, but in many countries the status of
civil servants has also been dramatically altered.
Civil servants have become de-privileged in terms of their condi-
tions of employment, losing their special conditions of recruitment,
advancement, uniformity of compensation and security. Moving away
from trusteeship and representation and moving towards more directly
responsible agency bargains is a strong trend (Pollitt and Bouckaert,
2011). The transfer of private sector management techniques into
the public sector challenges the notions of a career service, lifelong
employment and general employment conditions affecting the quality
of working life. Decentralization of responsibility for hiring, firing
and promotion and drift in prevailing norms about how these proc-
esses are determined contribute to making it increasingly difficult to
describe the operating internal labor market system (ILM) within a given
jurisdiction or organization. The notion of a single or even dual ILM
in government is obsolete. Movement away from collective bargaining
203
204 Per Lægreid and Lois Recascino Wise
In this section we look at five specific areas of change that civil service
systems have experienced:
(Levine, 1984). Pay freezes, downsizing and reduced pension rights have
been applied in many countries (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). In this
section we provide an overview of the consequences of the extent to
which conditions of government employment may have been compro-
mised during the first decade of the 21st century. As Lodge and Hood
(2012) observed, there are not only differences among countries in the
extent to which they are affected by fiscal stress (from high vulnerability
in Greece and Ireland to low in Norway), but different aspects of public
sector employment also fare differently in the way they are affected by
austerity. There is no single scenario of the consequences of the finan-
cial crisis for HRM but responses can be placed in two main categories:
workforce reductions and payroll reductions.
We expect that contextual factors, including political institutions,
history, socio-economic conditions, cultural norms and values, and
labor relations influence the extent to which austerity measures are
palatable or unpalatable in a particular country. For example, if main-
taining employment levels is prioritized, some form of payroll cut is
more palatable than measures that reduce numbers of employees. Lodge
and Hood (2012) argue that based on contextual factors, countries vary
in their degree of vulnerability to fiscal stress and this partly explains
differences in their selection of measures to cope with fiscal stress. For
example, a demographic factor such as an aging population may influ-
ence decisions to implement increases in the retirement age or pension
cuts or freezes (e.g. Estonia, Netherlands, Romania, Spain).
According to the most recent survey results from the OECD and the
European Trade Union Confederation for the period from 2008 to 2011
(also reported in Lodge and Hood, 2012), 8 countries had implemented
public sector pay freezes and 12 countries had implemented other pay
cuts such as reductions in benefits, allowances, and pensions affecting
public servants. Ten countries announced hiring freezes and another 12
countries indicated that they planned to reduce the size of the public
workforce. In the case of the United States, as a result of the budget crisis
of 2013, many agencies are implementing wide-scale furloughs as well
as hiring freezes (Government Executive, 2013). OECD data (2011/2012)
comparing employment levels in 2000 and 2008 show that while on
average for the 32 OECD states public sector employment rates remained
constant, it appears that 13 countries3 had already substantially reduced
public sector employment from 2000 levels to 2008, while five4 showed
a marked increase for the same time period. Denmark, for example, is
a country that had already reduced employment levels but proposed
to eliminate an additional 20,000 government jobs. Hiring has been
216 Per Lægreid and Lois Recascino Wise
5 An overall perspective
6 Implications
Notes
1. Under the Free Movement of Workers directive, member nations of the
European Union are required to open public sector labor markets to citizens of
member states. In other countries, non-citizens have established a significant
toehold in regional and local government.
2. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European
Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement No. 266887
(Project COCOPS), Socio-economic Sciences & Humanities. A survey of top
civil servants in ten European countries conducted in 2012 involving 4780
respondents, and a response rate of 26 percent (Hammerschmid et al., 2013).
3. Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands
Austria, Poland, Germany, Mexico, Japan (in descending order).
4. Estonia, Greece, Luxembourg, Slovak, Turkey.
5. The project leaders are Steven van der Walle, Erasmus University and Gerhard
Hammerschmid, Hertie School of Governance.
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Transitions in Civil Service Systems 221
1 Introduction
223
224 James L. Perry
For the most part, this chapter attends to only some of these questions,
but it is important to bear in mind the larger set of motivational ques-
tions that surround public service motivation as we proceed here.
3 Three questions
3.2 How do civil service systems produce the results they achieve?
The second question is related to how particular results are achieved. As
noted in answering the first question, the distal origin for civil service
systems establishing a foundation for public-service motivated behavior
is institutional. Perry and Vandenabeele (2008) summarized the chain of
causation as a proposition:
The premises suggest that work behavior has many origins, among
them rational choice, but also normative conformity and affective
bonding. In addition, an individual’s self-concept (i.e. his or her iden-
tity and values) is a significant filter through which these motivational
230 James L. Perry
Public
Total Job service
compensation security motivation
Some theory and empirical research addresses aspects of the three incen-
tives. With respect to pay, for example, research on the efficiency wage
is relevant and illuminating. Efficiency wage theory dictates that paying
employees above the market clearing rate or a wage premium guarantees
maximum effort (Davis and Gabris, 2008; Krueger and Summers, 1988;
Taylor and Taylor, 2011). Otherwise, employees will behave in a variety
of ways that will reduce their productivity, including shirk, sabotage or
turnover at high frequency.
Taylor and Taylor (2011) observe that empirical support for efficiency
wage theory in the public sector is limited because most of the research
has been confined to the market sector. Taylor and Taylor refer to Davis
and Gabris’s (2008) study of compensation among local governments in
the Chicago metropolitan area, where municipalities that implemented
above-market wages enjoyed reputations for high-quality performance.
Two recent studies in the public sector in developing countries (Banuri
and Keefer, 2013; Dal Bó, Finan and Rossi, 2013) provide conflicting
evidence about efficiency wages. Dal Bó et al. studied the consequences
of salary differences for public sector recruitment in a randomized exper-
iment in Mexico where applicants were screened in exams for intellec-
tual ability, personality and motivation. They found that higher wages
attract more able applicants with no evidence of adverse selection effects
on motivation, which contrasts with predictions that raising public
sector pay could attract staff with less public-regarding motivations or
who are more inclined to shirk because of difficulties monitoring public
work.
Banuri and Keefer (2013), using Indonesian students seeking work in
the public and private sectors, revisit the issues studied by Dal Bó et al.
(2013) with different results. Their study used dictator games and real
effort tasks to examine wage effects on a measure of motivation that
exactly matches the public sector task. They found that more prosocial
subjects were more likely to exert higher effort in a task that exactly
matches the measure of their prosociality. Second, when motivation is
measured in a way that exactly matches the public sector task, moti-
vated individuals are more likely to join the public sector when public
sector pay is low, but not when it is high. Finally, public sector workers
exhibited greater prosociality than private sector workers.
The contrasting results of Dal Bó et al. (2013) and Banuri and Keefer
(2013) indicate just how contested our knowledge about the interplay of
Civil Service Systems and Public Service Motivation 233
money and motivation really is. The public service motivation research
contests the primacy of wages as a driver of worker effort (Andersen,
2009). It argues that prosocial, other-oriented motives also matter (Perry
and Hondeghem, 2008). Taylor and Taylor’s (2011) 15-country study
offers further insights into the relationships between public service
motivation and efficiency wages. They found positive relationships
between wages and effort, supporting research on the motivating effects
of wages on performance among government workers. At the same time,
their results indicated that public service motivation was strongly linked
to high performance. They also discovered varying relative emphases on
wages and public service motivation as drivers of effort by the public
sector workforce in different countries.
Filling in this matrix would give managers and policy makers invaluable
information to better align incentives offered in civil service systems
with results.
6 Conclusion
This chapter reviewed and put into context theory and empirical
research about civil service systems and public service motivation. In
doing so, it organized the analysis around three questions: (1) Are some
civil service systems better at producing a public-service motivated
workforce?; (2) How do civil service systems, particularly those that are
successful, produce the results they achieve?; and (3) What are the mixes
of incentives that are most effective in stimulating public-service moti-
vated behaviors? The review established that empirical research linking
civil service systems and public service motivation that would offer clear
answers to the questions is in its early stages, but the foundations for
answers to the questions have been established.
During the next decade, we have an opportunity to make significant
headway to find answers to many of our outstanding questions. The
study of public service motivation has been undertaken by scholars in
dozens of countries around the world. Thus, a community of interest
exists internationally. Research on the mix of incentives, which has
multidisciplinary appeal, seems the most likely to yield dividends to
advance theory and practice about civil service systems around the
world.
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Civil Service Systems and Public Service Motivation 235
1 Introduction
237
238 Robert K. Christensen and Charles R. Wise
1994; Stone Sweet, 2000, 2004; Tate and Vallinder, 1995a), as illustrated
by Stone Sweet’s (2000: 3) observation that European ‘constitutional
judges will increasingly behave as sophisticated legislators.’
Fifteen years after Epstein (1999) rallied APSA’s Law and Courts
section around Gibson, Caldeira and Baird’s (1998: 343) declaration
that law and courts constitute ‘the most neglected subfield within
comparative politics,’ we have benefited from a surge in compara-
tive judicial scholarship (e.g. Cheung, 2006; Conant, 2007; Epstein,
Knight and Shvetsova, 2001; Jackson and Tushnet, 2002; Koopmans,
2003; Rothmayr, 2001; Shapiro and Stone Sweet, 2002; Stone Sweet
and Brunell, 2012).
We anticipate and hope that this trend will continue. While the field
is still developing, we offer a framework as a point of commonality
and within which future research on comparative judicialization can
proceed. We also propose several middle-range theories to encourage
and guide empirical work in this rising area of scholarship.
We do not suggest that the comparative judicialization research,
newness notwithstanding, offers little overarching conceptual guid-
ance. On the contrary, we attempt to incorporate and synthesize
existing models here. For example, Epstein and her colleagues (see
Epstein, 1999; Epstein et al., 2001) offer a useful model of judicial
review that allows comparative work according to court system char-
acteristics. Similarly, Stone Sweet (2000) and Koopmans (2003) call our
attention to how fundamental questions of separation of powers serve
as a comparative heuristic. By tying together models such as these with
our own insights, we offer an assembly of factors that can be used to
identify features of law and courts in assessing their comparative judi-
cialization potency.
Our framework contemplates:
2 Legal tradition
We focus on two traditions of positive law: common and civil law. Common
law describes a tradition where judges dominate the rule of conflicts, setting
the precedent-based law governing future, similar conflicts. This is a tradi-
tion where, as Raadschelders (2003: 126) describes, ‘justice precedes law,’
the codified law being a ‘rather late and occasional interloper’ (Horowitz,
1977: 1). Civil law, on the other hand, is law preceded by a justice articu-
lated by scholars and legislators as a guide, and often constraint, for judi-
cial bodies (Murphy, Pritchett and Epstein, 2002).
A theme of the preceding century’s comparative research has been
that the expansiveness of judicial policy depends on the context’s legal
tradition, whether civil or common law. Accordingly, legal tradition is an
important beginning point in our framework. Christie (2000: 224) offers
some insight into legal tradition’s significance:
Murphy et al. (2002: 5–6) describe the features of civil law in relation
to judicialization as a ‘system, closed, self-contained ... a neatly ordered
body of principles hierarchically arranged. Any judicial tampering with
this system, even a charitable effort to ease harsh effects of the [Civil]
Code’s commands, is bound, over the long run, to do more harm than
good.’ Common law, however, relies upon the creativity of a judiciary,
and is, by definition, that ‘part of the law that is within the province of
the courts themselves to establish’ (Eisenberg, 1988: 1).
Although the strong correlation between the common law tradition
and strong judicialization was a general assumption of 20th-century
comparative research, some observers have suggested that civil law
judges have gained increasing policy power (e.g. Murphy et al., 2002),
while common law judges in the United States have, in some instances
such as school desegregation cases, curbed their policy involvement.
Accordingly, we offer the following middle-range theory to test this
assumption’s validity in the 21st century:
This means that many European courts can and are encouraged to enter-
tain claims that may be brought by parties lacking individual interest in
a dispute, as long as those parties are petitioning in the defense of rights
recognized by society. In addition the EU Commission, the EU Council,
and the European Parliament have encouraged the empowerment
of private individuals to enforce EU laws through the courts, and the
European Court of Justice has developed a doctrine of state liability that
establishes conditions under which member states can be held liable for
damages suffered by individuals as a result of the member state’s failure
to implement community law (Kelemen, 2006: 109–110).
The implications of standing rules on judicialization are drawn by
Reitz (2002: 453):
3.1.3 Timing
Like standing rules, the US courts are also more bound than European
courts on when a dispute can be heard. The powers of US courts only
reach those disputes that have occurred or otherwise have an element
of ripeness. When judicial action cannot provide relief either because a
state act had not yet occurred or because the occurrence became moot,
US litigants are denied recourse. This requirement is commonly referred
to as ex post/a posteriori relief.
In contrast, the powers of European courts generally reach ex post/a
posteriori and a priori/ex ante, to cover those state acts that have not
fully materialized (Epstein et al., 2001). Also, when national courts are
hearing cases involving EU law, they are empowered to send ‘references’
to the European Court of Justice that inquire about the meaning of EU
provisions. The European Court of Justice replies with a preliminary
ruling which the national court subsequently applies and can use to
overturn incompatible national law (Conant, 2007: 48). Because these
courts are able to adjudicate across more temporal stages of a policy
issue, we offer the middle-range theory:
As Guarnieri et al. (2002: 79) observe, the less specialized ‘the scope
of judicial decisions is the more politically significant a judge’s role is
likely to be.’ Nevertheless, Guarnieri et al. recognize some debate in the
literature relative to this point. Our theory offers a good starting point
in testing this inquiry in the future.
4 Intergovernmental relations
government with respect to their relative rights and powers, such as the
boundaries between Bund and Länder governments’ (Wise and Brown,
1999: 534). Even ordinary courts in the United States wield this power.
Japan, however, prefers to ‘dispose of a case on nonconstitutional
grounds, and wherever possible, statuses should be construed so as to
avoid a constitutional issue’ (Wise and Brown, 1999: 538–539). Like
Japan, Provine (1996: 179) notes, courts in France are not on equal
footing with other government institutions; ‘institutional limitations
on judicial policy making have undoubtedly discouraged activists from
enlisting courts in their efforts.’ These limitations come in the form of
placing the judiciary subject to the authority of the Minister of Justice,
who is an executive appointee (Provine, 1996: 183).
Based on these considerations we propose the following middle-range
theory relative to intergovernmental relations:
higher courts shied away from overt defiance. These observations lead
us to our final middle-range theory:
6 Conclusion
between the judiciary and civil service system is complex and dynamic.
Notwithstanding, evidence suggests that judicial influence of policy and
public service configuration is increasing. We contend that the ability to
comparatively assess this relationship is key to understanding contem-
porary civil service systems.
While we have sought a parsimonious framework that builds upon past
models, we invite discussion of this framework – even thoughtful addi-
tions and subtractions relative to its components. We agree with Stone
(1994: 447) that ‘judicialization is an empirically verifiable phenom-
enon,’ and we have attempted to illustrate how our model might be
implemented by offering middle-range theories amenable to empirical,
comparative work.
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252 Robert K. Christensen and Charles R. Wise
255
256 John A. Rohr
engages his peers in dialog about the oath they share in common.
Further, I would like to know to what extent the civil servant and his
peers encourage their training officers to integrate some constitutional
principles into the training curriculum. Clearly, there is no bright line
dividing individual from institutional questions. Most questions have a
little bit of each.
Underlying my argument is the presumption that civil servants in
all four countries, and probably in many other countries as well, play
enormously significant roles in the governance of their countries. For
purposes of this chapter, my high-toned view of the civil service is
simply a presumption. I have defended the grounds of this presumption
elsewhere.5
American civil servants have contributed significantly to the devel-
opment of constitutional doctrine because of the problematic char-
acter of their legal status. I say problematic because of their dual role as
employees and citizens. Like civil servants everywhere, they experience
the inner tension that comes from this dual role. As employees, they are
the organizational inferiors of their political masters and should stand
ready to do their bidding. As citizens, however, civil servants are the
masters of the elected officials and, like all citizens, have a duty to see
to it that the elected officials serve the public faithfully. To harmonize
these two roles is no easy matter. Consequently, questions of disciplining
civil servants often follow the well-worn path to the courthouse, that
traditional repository, as de Tocqueville noted, of most of the difficulties
arising in the American political culture.
The conflict of roles often becomes acute when the employee’s freedom
of speech clashes with management’s insistence on silence. Let us
examine three Supreme Court decisions addressing this perennial issue.
I turn to decisions of the Supreme Court not only because they state
the law of the land authoritatively as of a certain time but also because
the justices give reasons for their opinions which are often subjected
to criticism by dissenting justices who disagree with the outcome of a
case. Thus, there is a dialectic element to Supreme Court opinions which
can serve as a model for civil servants who, ideally, would engage one
another in constitutional argument over events in their agencies. Courts
provide certain guidance for constitutional argument among alert civil
service citizens.
Our story of freedom of speech goes back to 1892 when a policeman
in New Bedford, Massachusetts, lost his job for talking about politics in
violation of a civil service reform regulation forbidding such conversa-
tions during working hours. The officer maintained that the regulation
258 John A. Rohr
media. This, of course, would violate every canon and standard of good
management, common sense and decency. It underscores, however, the
depth of the clash of cultures between the realms of public management
and constitutional law. As such this case puts managers on alert to the
fact that good management and good constitutional law do not always
harmonize.9
Further troubling lessons emerge from Rankin v. McPherson, a case
involving Ardith McPherson, a black, 19-year-old probationary employee
in the constable’s office of Harris County, Texas. On March 30, 1981,
McPherson heard the shocking news that President Ronald Reagan had
been shot outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. She turned to
her boyfriend and fellow employee and said, ‘If they go for him again,
I hope they get him.’ Unbeknownst to McPherson, another employee
was within earshot, heard the unfortunate remark and reported it to
Constable Rankin who immediately fired McPherson. Shortly thereafter,
McPherson sued for reinstatement in a federal district court in Texas. She
argued that even though she was a probationary employee, she could
not be terminated for exercising her constitutional right to free speech,
but that this is precisely what Constable Rankin had done. The district
court rejected her plea but the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
reversed, thereby prompting Rankin’s appeal to the Supreme Court
where McPherson prevailed. Following the Myers precedent, Justice
Thurgood Marshall found McPherson’s speech was of public concern
and therefore protected by the first amendment. The relevance of the
first amendment was not enough for McPherson to prevail. She needed
a favorable outcome from the Pickering balancing test wherein Justice
Marshall weighed McPherson’s free speech interest against Rankin’s
managerial interest in firing her for her intemperate remarks. He found
the balance to be struck in McPherson’s favor.
In a vigorous dissent, Justice Scalia maintained the court’s majority
misunderstood the true nature of the case before them. For Scalia, the issue
‘is not, as the Court suggests, whether Rankin’s interest in discharging
[McPherson] outweighs her rights under the first Amendment.’ Scalia
maintains that the court’s majority errs in confining Rankin’s interest in
this case to discharging McPherson. His correct interest is ‘in preventing
the expression of such statements in his agency’ as those McPherson
had uttered. Scalia concedes that termination may well be too severe a
punishment, but decisions of this nature are to be made by the Texas Civil
Service commission, not by the Supreme Court of the United States. By
placing inordinate emphasis on McPherson’s termination, the majority
had created a situation in which McPherson could be reinstated and
The Constitutional Responsibility of the Civil Service 261
then repeat her ill-advised comment on the first day she is back on the
job. Scalia’s argument brings home the main problem with balancing
tests. Considerable attention must be given to what goes on the scale.
The court should have balanced a broad range of possible administrative
actions for Rankin not just his interest in firing McPherson.
The examination of these three cases, Pickering, Myers and McPherson,
gives a hint of what I mean when I write about responsibility grounded
in the Constitution. Having taken an oath to uphold the Constitution,
civil servants would do well to study cases like the three just mentioned.
Regardless of whether a particular civil servant agrees or disagrees with
the outcome of a particular case, he or she will have learned several
principles that might be useful in one’s career. For example, one
learns the danger of relying on clever aphorisms, like Justice Holmes’
comment on the policeman having no right to his job. Pickering teaches
the advantages of balancing tests, but Scalia’s dissent in McPherson
points out the limitations of such tests and the importance of putting
the right object on the scale. Myers emphasizes the link between consti-
tutionally protected speech, and matters of serious public interest. The
opinions of the Supreme Court play an important pedagogical role in
instructing civil servants what their own rights and those of others
mean in practice.
The purpose of the constitutional study I suggest is not to form great
constitutional scholars; that we can leave to the law schools and the
political science departments. My goal is to provide the civil servant
with practical insights into constitutional practice. Such insights can
be gained even when most civil servants would disagree with a partic-
ular opinion. To illustrate my point, I have selected three decisions I
found rather questionable at least as far as my own sense of justice is
concerned. Let me tell the story of each of the cases and then let us
reflect upon them. The three cases address very different issues – child
abuse, Miranda rights and federal pension benefits – but all three points
in the same direction, namely, that even judicial decisions that seem
unduly harsh or unfair provide useful lessons for civil servants whose
sense of responsibility is grounded in the constitution.
Let us begin with the child abuse decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago
County Department of Social Services.10 This case focused on the tragic
story of Joshua DeShaney, an abused child whose father had beaten
him ‘so severely that he suffered permanent brain damage and was
rendered profoundly retarded.’ The boy’s mother sued the Department
of Social Services (DSS) of Winnebago County, Wisconsin, claiming that
the department’s failure to take affirmative action on Joshua’s behalf
262 John A. Rohr
deprived him of the liberty guaranteed by the due process clause of the
fourteenth amendment.
Joshua arrived in Winnebago County in 1980 as a one-year-old infant
in the care of his father, Randy, who had won custody of the boy when
the parents divorced while residing in Wyoming. Randy married again
and this marriage also ended in divorce. During the divorce proceed-
ings, Randy’s second wife told the police about her husband’s abusive
treatment of the boy, information that was duly passed on to the DSS.
The agency interviewed Randy who denied the charges. When Joshua
was admitted to a local hospital ‘with multiple bruises and abrasions,’
the DSS was again alerted to the possibility of abuse. Joshua was placed
temporarily in the custody of a hospital and then under a child protec-
tion team that included several employees of DSS. Eventually, Joshua
was returned to his father and shortly thereafter signs of abuse were
observed when the child was brought to an emergency room. For the
next six months Joshua’s caseworker noticed some hints of further abuse
but still no action was taken. After yet another trip to the emergency
room, the caseworker was denied entrance to Randy’s home but nothing
was done until the child – now four years old – arrived again at the
hospital after being beaten so severely that he fell into a life-threatening
coma. Finally, Randy was tried and convicted of child abuse and Joshua
was placed in an institution for the profoundly retarded where ‘he is
expected to spend the rest of his life.’
In view of this sorry record by the DSS, Joshua’s mother sued the DSS
in federal court for having denied her son his constitutionally guaran-
teed liberty under the fourteenth amendment. The Supreme Court of the
United States rejected the mother’s argument on the grounds that the
fourteenth amendment protects only against state action that deprives a
person of life, liberty or property without due process of law ( ‘nor shall
any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due
process of law’). Chief Justice Rehnquist noted that this decision did not
preclude Joshua’s mother from bringing her suit in a Wisconsin court. As
far as the federal courts were concerned, her suit could not go forward.
Despite its shocking failure to act, it was not the state of Wisconsin that
brought about Joshua’s condition. It was his father.
Our second example of a seemingly harsh judgment comes from the
field of law enforcement, specifically, the constitutional obligation of
arresting police officers to advise detainees of their right to remain silent
and to speak to a lawyer. In 1979, Brian Burbine was arrested for burglary
in Cranston, Rhode Island.11 The Cranston police suspected Burbine of
being the man wanted for a murder committed in nearby Providence,
The Constitutional Responsibility of the Civil Service 263
itself. From 1982 till 1985, Richmond drove a school bus on a part-time
basis which brought him US$12,494 annually, a sum well within the
approved guidelines. The next year he was offered additional employ-
ment with increased compensation. Before accepting the new posi-
tion, he consulted an employee relations specialist at the Navy Public
Works Center who assured him the increased income would present
no problem. Furthermore, he gave Richmond OPM documents from
the Federal Personnel Manual to support his opinion. Unfortunately, the
documents and the specialist’s opinions were out of date. After taking
the new position, Richmond was told he had exceeded the amount he
could earn and had nearly US$4000 withheld from his annuity income.
Richmond brought suit against OPM to recover the money he had lost
as a result of the erroneous advice he had received from the employee
specialist. His suit worked its way through the lower courts until it even-
tually reached the Supreme Court of the United States where Richmond’s
claim was defeated.
Richmond had based his case on the doctrine of ‘equitable estoppel.’
This means that ‘if A’s statement or conduct reasonably induces B’s detri-
mental reliance, A will not be permitted to act inconsistently with its
statement or conduct.’ In Richmond’s argument, he is B and the federal
government is A. To his detriment, he relied upon erroneous informa-
tion given by A, and therefore A should be ‘estopped’ from taking action
against him for doing so.
Writing for the court, Justice Kennedy relied primarily on Article 1,
Section 9, of the constitution which provides: ‘No money shall be drawn
from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law.’
The award Richmond seeks ‘would be in direct contravention of the
federal statute upon which his ultimate claim to the funds must rest.’
In effect, the well-intentioned Richmond is asking for money from the
Treasury of the United States which has never been appropriated. There
can be no place for the estoppel doctrine here, ‘for the courts cannot
estop the Constitution.’ Therefore the claim must be denied.
I hope you have a sense of why I consider these three decisions some-
what harsh and unfair. To be sure, something can be said for each of
them. To Joshua’s mother we can say that at the end of the day, the
fourteenth amendment does say ‘no State shall deprive’ (emphasis
added). We can remind Brian Burbine that the Miranda warnings were
intended to benefit the accused and not his lawyer. And we can ask
Charles Richmond if he really wants us to pay him with non-appro-
priated funds. These answers might have some merit in a technical or
even literal sense, but they still fall short of being exemplars of justice.
The Constitutional Responsibility of the Civil Service 265
dissent. How can it be, he asks, that political patronage, a practice as old
as the Republic itself, could be unconstitutional? Justice Stevens answers
that patronage is unconstitutional because it rests on the discredited
right–privilege dichotomy which, as we saw above, opened the door to
the dismissal on purely partisan grounds of persons fully qualified and
competent to hold their public office. The only possible justification for
such a practice is to consider the public office as a privilege which could
be withdrawn at the pleasure of the office holder’s superior. Thus the
centerpiece of Stevens’ argument is a string of personnel decisions from
the McCarthy era of the early 1950s to the late 1960s and culminating in
Pickering v. Board of Education which put an end to the privilege doctrine
which had dominated public personnel law throughout the first half
of the 20th century. It is quite clear that in Justice Stevens’ jurispru-
dence an authoritative judicial decision trumps constitutional practice
no matter how long or how venerable.
In reply, Justice Scalia offers a brief compendium of the ‘original
intent’ doctrine which has claimed so much attention in recent years.
To Stevens’ charge that Scalia is trying to resurrect the right–privilege
dichotomy, which ‘has met with unequivocal repudiation’ by the
Supreme Court, Scalia responds:
That will not do. If the right-privilege distinction was once used to
explain the practice [of patronage], and if that distinction is to be
repudiated, then one must simply devise some other theory to explain
it. The order of precedence is that a constitutional theory must be
wrong if it contradicts a clear constitutional tradition, not that a clear
constitutional tradition must be wrong if it does not conform to the
current constitutional theory. On Justice Stevens’ view of the matter,
this Court examines a historical practice, endows it with an intellec-
tual foundation, and later, by simply undermining that foundation,
relegates the constitutional tradition to the dustbin of history. That is
not how constitutional adjudication works.
Stevens and Scalia finds the civil service at the heart of one of the great
constitutional controversies of our time.
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter I have tried to develop the theme of the consti-
tutional importance of American civil servants. As for responsibility, I
suggest but one innovation which would be extremely controversial
but, if accepted, would help high-ranking civil servants come to a deeper
understanding of their roles as constitutional actors. Quite simply, I
propose that members of the Senior Executive Service promise openly
and publicly that they will not vote in any local, state or federal election
as long as they hold their official positions.
My proposal will surely meet serious criticism and rightly so. Some
will argue that it will deprive the electorate of thousands of its most
informed participants. Others will say it renders nugatory the impressive
argument that career officials are model citizens for the rest of us.
My primary reason for offering this proposal is pedagogical: to invite
the high-ranking civil servant to reflect on the high status he enjoys
in the constitutional order he has sworn to uphold. It would also give
assurances to his political master of his non-partisanship – or, to be more
precise, of his bipartisanship – supported by the statutory language on
responsibility in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Presidents and
presidential appointees should be free to pursue their political agenda,
secure in the knowledge that their high-ranking civil servants are trust-
worthy while at the same time they know these same politically loyal
civil servants will have the same loyalty to the next cohort of presi-
dential appointees and their successors. This loyalty would include safe-
guarding the secrets of previous administrations as is the traditional
constitutional practice in the United Kingdom.
I do not propose a secular version of the Vicar of Bray. The twofold
loyalty I support is not grounded in the vicar’s cynicism but in the
conscientious ideal of the highest form of public service: the preserva-
tion of a constitutional republic.
This country shall never want for zealous partisans who enter poli-
tics for such worthy ends as stopping terrorism, effecting meaningful
healthcare policies, reforming the military services, maintaining
adequate force levels for all services, and so on. Americans also need a
small cadre of civil servants who might have entered upon their careers
many years ago for any number of reasons but now see themselves as
single-mindedly dedicated to that cause above causes: the preservation
268 John A. Rohr
of the constitutional order of the Republic. They realize that the great
constitutional officers of the Republic cannot complete their appointed
rounds without adequate administrative support.
The proposal I put forward would be strictly voluntary. Any effort to
enshrine it in law or regulation would clearly violate the first amend-
ment. The political subordination to the president and to the heads of
his executive departments will not make mere ‘yes men’ of these high-
ranking civil servants I envision. Administration officials will soon learn
that these non-voting civil servants are as loyal as any member of the
administration but they are loyal in a markedly different way and for
markedly different reasons. The civil servant supports the president of
the day enthusiastically but always in a measured way so as to reserve for
the constitution itself ‘that last ounce of commitment.’14
In a word, I am suggesting a plan that might possibly start senior
American civil servants on a path that could earn them the prestige
enjoyed by their senior counterparts in Canada, France and the United
Kingdom. At the outset of this chapter I tried to show why the constitu-
tional traditions of these three countries were less useful for pedagogic
purposes than the Constitution of the United States. This is not a serious
problem for high-ranking civil servants in these countries because they
have earned prestige by other means. Perhaps American civil servants
could link the ‘non-voting bipartisanship’ I advocate to serious consti-
tutional study and reflection in order to enhance their self-awareness as
men and women who bear serious burdens of governance and deserve
the respect of their countrymen for whom they bear these burdens
well.
Notes
Several of the themes touched upon in this chapter are developed more fully
in my Civil Servants and Their Constitutions (Lawrence, KS: University Press of
Kansas, 2002). Conversely some themes touched upon in that book are extended
and more fully developed in this chapter. I wish to thank the University Press of
Kansas for granting permission to make use of my 2002 book in this chapter.
1. Reference re: Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 R.C.S., 218.
2. François Luchaire and Gérard Conac, La Constitution de la république française
(Paris: Economica, 1987).
3. Marie-France Toinet (1988) ‘La morale bureaucratique: Perspectives trans-
atlantiques et Franco-américaines,’ Revue internationale de science politique, 9
(July), 196.
4. Philip Norton (1982) The Constitution in Flux (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 5.
5. John A. Rohr (1989) Ethics for Bureaucrats: An Essay on Law and Values, 2nd
edn (New York: Marcel Dekker) and John A. Rohr (1986) To Run a Constitution:
The Constitutional Responsibility of the Civil Service 269
1 Introduction
270
Civil Service Systems and Responsibility 271
A core thesis of this model is that changes at at one level are likely to
lead to changes at the other levels.
The model can be complemented with Hood’s (1991: 11) three sets of
core values in public management: sigma-type values, theta-type values
and lambda-type values. Sigma-values include efficiency, effectiveness
and focus on ‘keeping it lean and purposeful.’ The emphasis of control
272 Gerrit S.A. Dijkstra
for’ (Mulgan 2000). Bovens (2005) traced it back to the financial dimen-
sion in Anglo-Norman times. Accountability is the obligation to answer
for an action, that is, the principle that individuals, organizations and
the community are responsible for their actions and may be required
to explain them to others in a certain forum. In this sense accounta-
bility works externally. In the responsibility dimension both an internal
(personal) moral and an external political institutional dimension can
be distinguished. Both terms are considered here as containing the same
meaning, favoring the term ‘accountability’ in the external setting and
‘responsibility’ for the overall concept.
The issue of civil service responsibility has been argued to be multi-
dimensional in nature. That multi-dimensional character has to do
with the conceptualization of the concept of responsibility (or account-
ability). A first clue regarding differences can be derived from the
Friedrich–Finer debate of the 1930s and 1940s. A (vertical) political insti-
tutional approach (Finer) was positioned against a moral and (inner)
professional approach (Friedrich). These positions still dominate discus-
sions. However, two additional points of view have developed in past
decades: a horizontal approach that tries to bridge the Friedrich–Finer
rift and a programmatic approach based on performance measurement
and the standardization of professional work though protocols. These
views give the multi-dimensional perspective on civil service systems
and their responsibility, accountability and performance its shape.
Each of these approaches (de-)emphasizes certain administrative values
with the necessary consequences. Before I discuss the issue of a(n)
(im)possible balance at the end of the chapter I will first examine the
four approaches.
Already during the 1930s and 1940s the traditional and predominantly
(legal constitutional) hierarchical construction of the responsibility
relationship between civil servants and politicians was questioned by
the American political scientist and German émigré Carl Friedrich. In
Friedrich’s opinion the traditional way of civil service responsibility was
more or less outdated. Friedrich started his analysis from the idea that
the number of civil servants had increased over the decades and assumed
that with it their discretionary powers must have grown. In addition, the
hierarchical mode of control could also lead to unacceptable outcomes,
as, for instance, could be witnessed in Nazi Germany when the moral
274 Gerrit S.A. Dijkstra
This contribution focused on the different ways civil servants are held
and made responsible. In the introduction I distinguished four possible
routes: the moral ethical route as argued by Friedrich and others, the
internal political (hierarchical) or vertical approach, the external polit-
ical societal or horizontal approach and the programmatic approach
through measurable performance standards.
The different country studies in the civil service project show that
in a few decades NPM has become an almost worldwide trend and this
is still the case in the present economic and financial crisis. De Vries
(2010): ‘New public management is in trouble, but it is not really dead.
There are some new avenues of thought. However, none of these new
approaches is strong enough to be the paradigmatic alternative.’ One
could even argue that New Public Management is still dominant in most
Western countries because of the economic crisis. Governments have
282 Gerrit S.A. Dijkstra
Note
1. There might even be some need to divide sigma-values into sigma 1 (legality)
and sigma 2 (democracy). But then again, where would the limit be, as within
sigma 2 values a distinction could be made between formal democratic values
(sigma 2a) and responsiveness (sigma 2b). This distinction is relevant for
demarcating vertical and horizontal forms of responsibility.
284 Gerrit S.A. Dijkstra
References
Aberbach, Joel D. and Bert A. Rockman (2001) ‚Reinventing Government or
Reinventing Politics?’ in B.Guy Peters and Jon Pierre (eds) Politicians, Bureaucrats
and Administrative Reform (London: Routledge), pp. 22–31.
Behn, R.D. (2001) Rethinking Democratic Accountability (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institute).
Bovens, Mark (2005) ‘Public Accountability,’ in Ewan Ferlie, Laurence Lynn Jr. and
Christopher Pollitt (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Public Management (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), pp. 182–208.
Bruijn, Hans de (2002) Managing Performance in the Public Sector (London:
Routledge).
Cooke, M.L. (1918) Our Cities Awake (New York: Doran and Co).
Denhardt, R.B. (1984) Theories of Public Organization (Pacific Grove, CA Books/
Cole).
Denhardt, Robert B. and Thomas J. Catlaw (2011) Theories of Public Organizations
(Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning).
Divivedi, O.P. (2003) ‘The Canadian Public Service: Balancing Values and
Management,’ in J. Halligan (ed.) Civil Service Systems in Anglo-American
Countries (Cheltenham UK/Northampton MA: Edgar Elgar), pp. 148–173.
Finer, Herman (1978) ‘Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government,’
in F.E. Gourke (ed.) Bureaucratic Power in National Politics (Boston: Oxford
University Press), pp. 410–421.
Friedrich, C.J. (1978) ‘Public Policy and the Nature of Administrative Responsibility,’
in F.E. Gourke (ed.) Bureaucratic Power in National Politics (Boston, MA: Oxford
University Press), pp. 399–409.
Halligan, John (2003) Civil Service Systems in Anglo-American Countries (Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar).
Hood, C. (1991) ‘A New Public Management for All Seasons,’ Public Administration,
69, 3–19.
Harmon, Michael N. (1995) Responsibility as Paradox. A Critique of Rational
Discourse on Government (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).
Hood, C. (1996) ‘Exploring Variations in Public Management Reform of the
1980s,’ in Hans A.G.M. Bekke, James L. Perry and Theo A.J. Toonen (eds) Civil
Service Systems in Comparative Perspective (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press), pp. 268–287.
Ingraham, Patricia W. and Donald P. Moynihan (2003) ‘Civil Service and
Administrative Reform in the United States,’ in John Halligan (ed.) Civil
Service Systems in Anglo-American Countries (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar) , pp.
174–194.
Kiser, L. and E. Ostrom (1982) ‘The Three Worlds Of Action: A Metatheoretical
Synthesis of Institutional Approaches,’ in Strategies of Political Inquiry (Beverly
Hills, CA) pp. 179–222.
Levy, Roger (2010) ‘New Public Management: End of an Era?’ Public Policy and
Administration, 25(2), 234–240.
Mosher, Frederick (1968) Democracy and the Public Service (New York: Oxford
University Press).
Mulgan, Richard (2000) ‘Comparing Accountability in Public and Private Sectors,’
Australian Journal of Public Administration, 59(1), 87–97.
Civil Service Systems and Responsibility 285
1 Introduction
Public administration research and teaching over the past several decades
have been focused heavily on theorizing and explaining institutional
change in civil service systems. It could perhaps be argued that organi-
zational change always has been an important feature of the discipline,
with literatures such as organizational development focusing on endog-
enous sources of change in public organizations. The changes brought
about by austerity, New Public Management and the development of
governance approaches to public administration, however, pose major
new exogenous challenges to the Western civil service systems. This
focus on change, both within the civil service and also in its relation-
ship with actors in its environment, has entailed problems of several
different kinds.
One type of problem stems from the relative lack of focus on change
in many public administration theories. Much of the organizational
theory on public organizations, for instance, was mainly concerned
with organizational structure as such and had little reason to concep-
tualize major changes in public organizations. Similarly, early schools
of human resource management departed to a large extent from the
assumption that public and private careers tracks were not in any mean-
ingful contact with each other, hence there was little need to look at
public employment strategies in a competitive perspective. And, most
obviously, managing public organizations was believed to be a wholly
different enterprise compared to private organizations; while change and
adaptive strategies were believed to be critical to corporate organizations,
286
Governance and Civil Service Systems 287
very little was said along those lines with regard to the public sector (see
Allison, 1972).
Thus, the conventional models of civil service systems that had grown
up over decades in the industrialized democracies tended to provide
relatively easy answers to the difficult questions of how to administer
public policies. That capacity to provide answers was certainly true of
Weberian/Wilsonian hierarchical systems that focused on the career,
neutrally competent civil servant as the best means, in both normative
and empirical terms, of translating policies into action (Derlien, 1999;
Kettl, 2002). More recent approaches to management in the public sector
also provided clear and relatively unambiguous answers to questions of
what to do when working in the public sector. These answers now are
often considered inadequate, or just wrong, but in their own way they
were capable of organizing administrative life and producing effective
governance.
The major exception to the above generalizations has been the litera-
ture on development administration and the management of change
in transitional countries. Unfortunately, this emphasis on change has
not permeated the remainder of the discipline. Further, most scholars
working in the more developed administrative systems have assumed
that their models would be easily applicable to the remainder of the
world. That assumption has been especially true in many donor organi-
zations that have attempted to spread New Public Management to other
parts of the world, often with disastrous results (see Schick, 1998).
The analysis presented in the original Bekke, Perry and Toonen (1996)
volume on comparative civil service systems proposed that the disjunc-
ture between constitutional provisions and functional demands for
administration was the principal source of change pressures in civil
service systems (pp. 323–324). They also argued that disparities existing
between the socio-economic and political environment of administra-
tion and the civil service were important sources of tension and change
(pp. 324–325).1 In short, the civil service system operates within a social,
cultural and political environment, and if there is inadequate congru-
ence between the administrative systems and that environment then
there will be strong pressures to move toward a more congruent system.
Analogously, the literature on institutional theory points to the role that
disparities between values and operational demands plays in generating
change (Brunsson and Olsen, 1993; Dimaggio and Powell, 1983).
288 B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre
humans that have required action from the public sector – take Dutch
water management as a clear example – the natural system has been
seemingly more threatening in the beginning of the 21st century. A
range of challenges such a major storms, tsunamis and earthquakes
have all strained administrative capacities and often revealed serious
deficiencies. Perhaps the most egregious of those was Katrina in New
Orleans, but others such as the Indonesian tsunami and the earth-
quake in Haiti all demonstrate the fragility of administration in times
of crisis.
The crises and challenges presented by humans, and their interac-
tions with the environment, have dominated the past decade of public
administration and have forced substantial reforms within the public
sector. The financial crisis beginning in 2007 has produced large-scale
changes in the public sector of most industrialized democracies (Peters,
Pierre and Randma-Liiv, 2011). A number of new institutions have been
created to cope with this crisis and others have had to alter the manner
in which they function. Further, the continuing economic crisis has
reduced public revenues and forced austerity on many countries, and
led to substantial expansions of the public sector in others.
The challenges to governance posed by human interactions with
the environment are becoming more manifest and are also likely to
continue. Although the direct impacts on the nature of the civil service
may not be evident, the indirect impacts are likely to be significant.
The emergence of complex, ‘wicked’ problems such as climate change,
food and water policies, and migration are all likely to require the civil
service to shift from narrow forms of structure and expertise to more
comprehensive and integrated ways of managing policy issues. At the
same time these policies and their longer-term orientations will require
more policy expertise and the end of the short-term thinking of mana-
gerialism (see Jacobs, 2011).
The prevalence of crises of all sorts, and the need for more extended
understandings of public policy, will require a more flexible and more
integrated public service. While this to some extent would have been
true even within the hierarchically ordered Weberian civil service
systems, it is ironic in some ways to note that the managerial revo-
lution in the public sector does not seem to have left an imprint on
the capabilities of the public sector to address extraordinary situations
or crises. And the denigration of the policy analytic capacity of the
senior public service appears to have left it less prepared to provide
decision makers the expertise required to cope with a growing array of
challenges.
290 B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre
The recent challenges to the public sector are not, however, confined
to taking rapid and appropriate action in the wake of natural and man-
made disasters, but have to do with dealing with contingencies more
generally. For the purposes of this chapter perhaps the most crucial shift
in the position of public administration has been the movement away
from a concentration on government per se and toward more concern
with governance (but see Frederickson, 2005). Much of the discussion
of governance has focused on the role of non-governmental actors in
producing public policies. This shift in emphasis has occurred both in
the real world of government and in the academic literature on the
subject. It has been easy to over-emphasize this transformation in the
style of achieving collective goals, and to assume that ‘governance
without government’ is a real possibility (see Rhodes, 1996). Despite the
importance of networks and connections of government organizations
with organizations in the civil society, there is still a central role for
government to play.
The shift toward a governance conception in collective goal-setting
has a number of implications for the role of administration. In descrip-
tive terms the shift toward governance means that government is now
more the Enabling State than it is a Hierarchical, Commanding State.
Over the past several decades a number of cooperative instruments for
delivering public programs have become standard components in the
repertoire of government when confronting policy problems, especially
in social, health and urban policy (Salamon, 2002). Governments now
use contracts, partnerships, co-production and co-finance, and other
creative arrangements to find the means of delivering policies (Torfing
et al., 2011). Using these instruments, however, does not preclude the
continuing use of hierarchical methods and hierarchical management
within the public sector.
In more analytical and theoretical terms governance means that rather
than there being clear and widely accepted answers to most questions in
government, many of the issues of structure and process are open and
subject to negotiation, bargaining and creative forms of institutional
design. The answers of how to approach any particular policy delivery
question are no longer programmed, with the assumption that govern-
ment and its civil service will deliver the service (Walsh and Stewart,
1992). As noted above, the selection of instruments for achieving public
purposes now extends beyond simply those involving government itself
and includes a range of cooperative arrangements, and these may be
Governance and Civil Service Systems 291
selected by bargaining with the affected actors rather than by fiat within
government.
One of the clearest arguments concerning the indeterminate and
bargained nature of governance arrangements can be found in the liter-
ature on multi-level governance (Bache and Flinders, 2004; Pierre and
Stoker, 2000; Smith, 1997). Whereas formalized models of federalism rely
on legal or constitutional arrangements to specify patterns of interaction
among the parties involved, multi-level governance (and intergovern-
mental politics in the United States model; [Wright, 1981) depends upon
negotiating relationships among the actors involved. This bargaining has
been lauded by the advocates of this form of governance as promoting
greater democracy and openness in government. On the other hand,
however, the absence of legal provisions specifying power positions may
well strengthen the already more powerful actors, defined both by level
of government and by their political power. Thus, multi-level govern-
ance and its bargaining arrangements may well be a Faustian bargain in
which the presumed democratic advantages of greater bargaining and
openness are offset by the capacity of institutions and dominant inter-
ests to dominate that bargaining (Peters and Pierre, 2004).
out in network settings, the actors involved must still demonstrate that
they are delivering those services. That said, performance management
presents its own difficulties of measurement and a short-term perspec-
tive that can limits its positive effects (Radin, 2006).
In terms of civil service systems the movement toward governance
(and the coterminous adoption of New Public Management ideas)3 dein-
stitutionalizes these systems in structural terms, yet paradoxically also
may enhance the functional power of the civil servants who remain
after the reforms. As argued above with respect to multi-level govern-
ance, the loosening of constraints over previously determinate systems,
and the substitution of bargaining and negotiation for hierarchy and
rules, differentially empowers individuals and institutions with clear
preferences. Thus, the career civil service may be able to exert substan-
tial control over governance even after it has been nominally devalued.
Thus, there is an empirical question about the relative power position
of civil servants in reformed administrative arrangements under govern-
ance regimes. Also, even if the civil service remains a source of steering
and control, we need to remind ourselves that this to some extent is
less a control that comes from public office in a narrow sense and more
a matter of control that is derived from an ability to coordinate and
engage other actors.
In addition to the loosening of the conventional institutional
constraints on policy and administration, shifts toward governance also
change the instruments used to govern, and extend the role of bargaining
and negotiation. Much of that bargaining will be done by lower-ech-
elon officials in the public sector, and therefore their discretion will be
enhanced (Page and Jenkins, 2005). Law and legal controls will to some
extent have been de-emphasized so that the discretion of the street-
level bureaucrat or the ‘street-level negotiator’ will be enhanced. This
increased discretion at the bottom of organizations, in turn, feeds back
into the accountability question raised above, and monitoring contracts
and framework agreements becomes a more central aspect of the job of
political actors and senior officials in the public sector.
Finally, and perhaps more fundamentally, there may be a contradic-
tion between the bargaining style of governance that has emerged and
the requirements of a more complex and uncertain environment. On
the one hand the argument would be that the uncertainty of the envi-
ronment may be best addressed by bargaining and social negotiation in
order to build resilience and agreement among members of society. This
consensus building would appear to be good politics for coping with the
Governance and Civil Service Systems 295
8 Summary
Notes
1. This explanation for change is similar to that central to the normative version
of institutionalism. Brunsson and Olsen (1993) (see also Brunsson, 1989) argue
298 B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre
that a marked disjuncture between action and stated norms will be a primary
motivation for change in institutions.
2. We need only look at globalization of economies, the multi-polar nature
of international relations, and insecurities surrounding the welfare state to
understand this instability.
3. These two changes in the political and administrative systems to some extent
employ similar ideas about governing, but may do so for rather different
reasons. For example, both bodies of literature emphasize ideas like ‘Steer,
don’t Row,’ a phrase made popular by the execrable Osborne and Gaebler book
(1992). In the NPM world the use of non-governmental actors is to reduce
costs, increase efficiency, and limit the power of the state. In the governance
approach there are some elements of efficiency but the principal justifica-
tion is to involve the civil society, enhance participation, and recognize the
capacity of networks in civil society to provide at least a certain degree of self-
management in their policy areas.
References
Allison, G.T. (1972) The Essence of Decision (Boston, MA: Little, Brown).
Bache, I. and M. Flinders (eds) (2004) Multi-level Governance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Bekke, Hans A.G.M., James L. Perry and Theo A.J. Toonen (1996) Civil Service
Systems in Comparative Perspective (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana
Press).
Beryl A. Radin (2006) Challenging the Performance Movement Accountability,
Complexity, and Democratic Value Georgetown (Washington, DC: University
Press).
Brunsson, N. (1989) The Organization of Hypocrisy (New York: Wiley).
Brunsson, N. and J.P. Olsen (1993) The Reforming Organization (London:
Routledge).
Burns, J. and B. Bowornwathana (2001) Civil Service Systems in Asia (Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar).
Chapman, R.A. (2000) Ethics in Public Service for the New Millennium (Aldershot:
Ashgate).
Dahlström, C., B.G. Peters and J. Pierre (2011) Steering from the Centre: Central
Government Offices and Their Roles in Governing (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press).
Derlien, H.-U. (1999) ‘On the Selective Interpretation of Max Weber’s Concept
of Bureaucracy in Organization Theory and Administrative Science,’ in P.
Ahonen and K. Palonen (eds) Dis-Embalming Max Weber (Jyväskylä, Finland:
SoPhi).
Dimaggio, P.J. and W.W. Powell (1983) ’The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional
Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.,’ American
Sociological Review, 48(2), 147–160.
Du Gay, P. (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy (London: Sage).
Frederickson, H.G. (2005) ‘What Happened to Public Administration: Governance,
Governance Everywhere,’ in E. Ferlie, L.E. Lynn and C. Pollitt (eds) The
Governance and Civil Service Systems 299
301
302 Richard J. Stillman II
Recall that the idea of a federal higher civil service had been wrestled
with for 30 years prior to 1978 as well as actually crafted for legislation by
the Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon administrations. Each defeat none-
theless proved a positive learning process for reformers because advo-
cates had to go back to the drawing board and fine-tune the proposal
which, in turn, improved is public salability. Particularly during the late
Johnson and early Nixon administrations, the Civil Service Commission
conducted extensive staff analyses of data and information about
top federal employees, focusing upon their pay, selection, retention,
mobility, status, work content and so forth. These detailed, empirical
examinations of the federal higher civil service highlighted glaring
issues of poor pay, lack of mobility, the necessity for a distinct cadre
of top general public managers and low status. The easy availability of
these studies and knowledge of what went wrong with prior legislative
reform attempts were what Carter’s CSR initiative built upon and used
successfully to justify and then push through SES.
close ties with the White House to craft legislation as well as with key
legislative committees that would be charged with enacting CRS showed
keen political insight into the ways of Washington.
Campbell was especially shrewd to involve all the major interests,
such as public employee unions, in both the study and crafting of CRS
ahead of time, so that there was widespread agreement and support by all
major parties before Congress began public hearings. Thus there were no
surprises since interest group ‘buy-in’ had been obtained quietly before
broad public discussions ensued. When they did occur, Campbell was
on the offensive, out in front on national TV, and by writing editorials
in leading newspapers in key states of important congressional leaders
in order to secure their support. Both Houses passed CSR near unani-
mously. His timing could not have been better. For if legislation had
waited one more year, it probably would not have succeeded because of
the serious foreign affairs controversies over the Panama Canal Treaty
and Iran hostages, which increasingly diverted both presidential and
public attention away from domestic reforms. Carter’s defeat by Reagan
in 1980 further sealed any possibilities for CSR enactment for the next
decade or more, since Reagan’s priorities stressed cutting the overall
federal workforce, not enhancing its micro-managerial proficiencies.
The first American Civil Service Act of 1883 passed because of President
James Garfield’s assassination in 1881 by a disappointed political office
seeker who purportedly was not given his desired post. It stunned the
nation and resulted in public outrage and Congress’s enactment of civil
service legislation. Likewise, the innovative 1978 Civil Service Reform
proposal would not have been approved were it not for the confluence
of events of Watergate, Vietnam and Carter’s election on a popular anti-
Washington agenda, along with continued Democratic control of both
the Senate and House of Representatives. These events allowed a unique
310 Richard J. Stillman II
window of opportunity to open for CSR’s passage during the first two
years of the Carter administration. However, unforeseen crises overseas
shut that opening just a quickly – and forcefully – during the last two
years of his presidency. The 1978 CRA seemed to repeat the 1883 CS
experience.
During his four-year tenure, SES personnel suffered low morale and high
turnover, many fearing for their jobs given the increased latitude SES
legislation afforded the chief executive to move top federal personnel
according to his political agenda. (A case in point: a transfer to Billings,
Montana after an entire career in Washington, DC can be a sobering, if
not devastating personal experience for a married, middle-aged careerist
whose spouse also works in Washington and who depends upon two
incomes to support the family household).
Recent studies of SES are striking in that they raise many of the same
issues with the senior civil service that the CSR was meant to resolve. The
National Academy of Public Administration Report (NAPA, 2002) re-em-
phasized the original goals of CSR:
SES’s structure and composition have barriers that impede the federal
government’s ability to recruit, retain, develop, and capitalize on one
of the nation’s greatest resources [its senior leaders]. Specialization
and selection, based on technical qualifications, characterize SES’
composition … The SES compensation and rewards subsystems do
312 Richard J. Stillman II
In her book (1995) about top-level, career federal civil servants, Riccucci
mentions SES only twice, briefly on two pages of her 251-page book.
The oversight was not intentional but rather, I suspect, more accurately
reflects the realities of innovative leadership within modem American
government. Her detailed portraits of six men and women who achieved
extraordinary leadership accomplishments in the federal service had
little to do with SES processes and everything to do with their unique
courage, character and expertise.
While the nine lessons do not exhaust the numerous possibilities that
can be drawn for the future, this framing exercise raises several other
possible problems to ponder. Such questions can turn into stimulating
sources for speculating about devising new historic frames useful for
further lesson drawing about tomorrow’s civil service systems, such as:
● Can examining the American SES experience hold any useful lessons
for nations beyond its shores? Or, is the USA’s political culture so
dissimilar from others that such lesson-drawing comparisons are of
little help across cultures?
● Does the effective institutionalization of SES for America and other
nations also turn ultimately on effective political support, sustained
even through difficult government transitions? And if so, how is that
ongoing political backing best maintained?
● Is individual character what counts more than any sort of higher
civil service system for ensuring innovative leadership at the top?
And if so, how can that human quality be found, nurtured and put
into elite career positions? If not via SES, how? Are recent attitudinal
changes toward work as evidenced by a younger generation entering
government service significantly affecting SES’s original fundamental
assumptions, and in turn, exacerbating its contemporary prob-
lems? And if so, how can SES best adapt to such changing workplace
norms?
● Is the entire issue of adopting SES really more about the broader theo-
retical problem of how and where government – any government –
draws the line between politics and administration, meaning that the
creation of any kind of effective higher civil service system depends
upon ensuring administrative discretion for top-level, career public
managers?
● What is the link between university preparation and higher civil
service innovative leadership? Do increasing university specializa-
tions negate fostering broader innovate leadership by senior bureau-
crats? Or, can the subject be taught best at mid-level ranks? But can
innovative leadership be taught at all? Or, is advanced generalist
training to promote innovative leadership within the higher public
Is Past Prologue to 21st-Century Civil Service Systems? 315
To sum up, this SES ‘lab experiment,’ in using the institutional past
to generalize about its possible 21st-century directions, demonstrated
some pluses as a method to focus on different time dimensions of one
institution, as well as for carefully examining the factual information
relative to that particular historic frame, raising questions about those
facts, and then permitting some tentative generalizations to emerge
relative to what that particular frame implies for today and tomorrow’s
institutional development. However, this experiment also underscores
its many limitations.
No scientific law can be discovered by using this method. It will not
create nomothetic knowledge, but rather uses idiographic knowledge of
history to analyze individual aspects of reality that give meaning to the
present and future.
The experiment was confined to one institutional history within
one political culture. Since there was no attempt to apply its findings
outside its national boundaries, it did not and perhaps cannot address
the substance of higher civil service futures elsewhere. Though its meth-
odology may be applicable elsewhere, there are caveats even here.
First, the choice of institution to analyze presupposes it had a history
to analyze. Without a past, this historic framing exercise could not apply
to examining prospects for something that is an entirely ‘new’ institu-
tional innovation.
Second, selecting the historic frames and lessons drawn, even the
choice of facts to present within each frame, is ultimately subjectively
determined. There is no ‘one best way’ to decide. So as in all social
science research, this method is prone to human error and imperfection,
no matter the political culture to which it is applied.
316 Richard J. Stillman II
References
Huddleston, M. and W. Boyer (1996) The Higher Civil Service in the United States:
Quest for Reform (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press).
Karl, B. (l976) ‘Public Administration and American History: A Century of
Professionalism,’ Public Administration Review, 36(5), 489–503.
Light, P. (1999) The New Public Service (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution).
Long, N. (1949) ‘Power and Administration,’ Public Administration Review, 9,
257–264.
National Academy of Public Administration (2002) Strengthening Senior Leadership
in the US Government (Washington, DC: NAPA).
Riccucci, N. (1995) Unsung Heroes: Federal Execucrats Making a Difference
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press).
Santayana, G. (1940) ‘Apologia Pro Mente Sua,’ in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The
Philosophy of George Santayana (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press).
Sherwood, F. (1978) ‘Summary Statement on the New Senior Executive Service.’
Unpublished report.
18
Political-Administrative Relations:
Evolving Models of Politicization
Luc Rouban
1 Introduction
317
318 Luc Rouban
The consequences of the civil service (NPM) reforms for the political-
administrative relations will be explored through two main questions:
From the first reform steps of the British civil service in the early 1980s to
the privatization of the Italian civil service in 1993 or the reform stance
of the French Sarkozy’s presidency in 2007, NPM-style reforms have been
built upon a series of criticisms against a civil service alternatively or
cumulatively viewed as ‘social-democrat,’ ‘Welfare proactive’ or ‘conserv-
ative.’ In the eyes of politicians, civil servants became the ‘enemy’ from
within. In post-Gaullist France, President Chirac said during the 1995
electoral campaign that it was necessary to ‘get rid of the technocrats.’
Since the 2008 fiscal crisis, criticisms against the civil service reached
their apex supported by pro-business think tanks calling for radical
budget reductions. From a historical point of view, this may be regarded
as a reversal of alliance: the politicians allied with business against their
own civil servants, while the modernity bargain of the 1960s had been
largely built upon the alliance of the elites, whether public or private,
against the ‘civil society’ (i.e. the working class and the middle class) in
the name of new major government technocratic programs. A set of new
strategies have been used by the various European governments to subor-
dinate their ‘arrogant,’ ‘tricky,’ then ‘over-costly’ civil servants.
320 Luc Rouban
regaining a relative new strength with the fiscal crisis. With NPM, senior
bureaucrats are supposed to serve as managers. This means the end of the
‘generalist’ culture which was a distinctive feature, for instance, of the
British or French ‘mandarins’ in the 1960s, at least for those unable to
obtain upper positions in close contact with politicians (policy advisers
or ministerial cabinets members). NPM reforms call for specialists
and technicians along the lines of a professional management. Public
management theory and practice is far removed from the ‘amateur’ and
the ‘old boy’ who could occupy various jobs without too much relevant
technical expertise. From a sociological point of view, NPM is much
more favorable to middle classes than to upper classes. Surveysshow
that senior civil servants with scientific, engineering or even legal
degrees – those who are more involved in NPM reforms – are coming
from lower social origins than those who have been trained in admin-
istrative schools, such as the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in France,
or in elite academic programs, such as the ‘Oxbridge’ fellows in Great
Britain (Rouban, 1995; Theakston and Fry, 1989). Margaret Thatcher did
not hide the fact that she distrusted British traditional elites whether
they came from the City or from within her own party (Thatcher, 1993).
Generally, NPM reforms may be seen as a ‘revenge’ of the middle class
upon the higher layers of society, especially in those countries where
senior civil service positions traditionally were reserved for the social
elite (Page and Wright, 1999). In countries where the higher civil service
is rooted in middle classes (e.g. Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden or
even Switzerland), NPM reforms have been adopted easily. In Southern
Europe, including France, it is another story because the old social hier-
archy of the civil service has not been upset. On the other hand, even
if it is too early to say whether there is a ‘technocratic come-back,’ the
fiscal crisis has made politicians more sensitive to experts’ advice and
(more or less politicized) higher civil servants precious for their budget
know-how. In France, under the Sarkozy or the Hollande presidency as
well, higher civil servants from the ENA have reinforced their position
in the ministerial top-level staff (Rouban, 2012b).
politicization means political trust and more personal ties between the
higher civil servants and the elected leaders.
In Spain, the starting point of NPM reforms was in 1997 when upper
administrative positions were organized and defined, but so much
control was given to the ministers that an almost traditional spoils system
was created. One year later, when the conservative Partido Popular took
power, there was a new wave of political appointments. Similarly, the
devolution process, giving the ‘autonomous communities’ a crucial role
in most domestic policies, has reinforced politicization at the regional
level, giving even more power to the political parties in choosing the
local managers (Alba, 1998).
In two other countries, politicization has been enhanced or main-
tained although these countries are characterized by absence of any real
NPM reform, at least at the national level and as far as the higher civil
service is concerned. In France, ministerial cabinets have become much
more controlling of most of the policy-making process, and a system-
atic turnover of senior civil servants has occurred (both in top-level
ministerial positions in strategic local positions, such as the prefects)
(Rouban, 2009). In Germany, scholars observed that the political influ-
ence over the upper administrative positions intensified in the 1990s
while a growing number of politischer beamte have been dismissed, that
is, invited to retire at an early age (Derlien, 1995). At the same time,
though, it is clear that the newly appointed are generally professional
civil servants with sectoral expertise.
In countries with coalition governments, such as Austria, Belgium
and the Netherlands, civil service politicization has another meaning,
as it contributes to the equilibrium between the various partners within
the winning coalition. In those cases, the impact of the politicization
process can be absorbed or ‘regulated’ because the appointed leaders in
the various ministries and agencies do not necessarily share the same
political affiliation, yet do share basic values. In the Netherlands, for
instance, appointments are connected to political networks but there is
not a real spoils system (Van der Meer and Raadschelders, 1998, 2007),
while politicization practices in Belgium have always been rougher
whatever the effect of the NPM reforms (Hondeghem, 1998).
Generally, higher civil servants have been more ‘politicized’ in most
European countries since the early 1990s. That this coincided with NPM
reform is neither a sign of a causal effect nor of a random effect. It could
be hard to demonstrate that NPM reforms call mechanically for more
politicization. In Sweden, for instance, there is no connection between
the degree of financial or human resources autonomy that the various
Political-Administrative Relations 325
agencies enjoy and the politicization of their general directors who are
appointed freely by the government (Niklasson, 2013).
But it may be misleading to think that the two phenomena are
independent or contradictory. As European governments are evalu-
ated both internationally by financial rating agencies and internally
by their own citizens on the basis of economic criteria, they need to
rely on friendly networks which give them a quick policy feedback
without losing too much time and effort in bargaining with reluc-
tant professional civil servants arguing that they know their business.
One may find here the real explanation of the civil service politiciza-
tion, since neither the ideological bias of the parties in power nor the
years a government spends in power can alone increase politicization
(Dahlström and Niklasson, 2013). Empirically, we are confronted here
with huge methodological problems since the ‘politicization’ process
may be very subtle and hidden, relying more on personal networks
than on partisan membership (Rouban, 2012a). Regardless, it can be
assumed that politicization and NPM reforms together have a major
consequence on the whole political-administrative structure, sepa-
rating more clearly those who are in charge of political priorities, be
they managers or elected officials, and those who only manage budget
resources and personnel.
by the UK railway system, are much more risky. Customers discover that,
when things go wrong, they have no other choice than complaining to
their local elected politicians. Political involvement is still more efficient
than endless and costly judicial suits, especially when there is no fault
but only a poor quality/price ratio. The other limit has been observed
in the mid-1990s in the Netherlands as well as in some Nordic coun-
tries such as Sweden. The multiplication of independent administrative
authorities and ‘quangos’ has been criticized by politicians themselves
who did not know any more what was going on and asked for a recen-
tralization of governmental tasks within ministerial departments.
Nobody can say who will be the winner in the ‘deconstruction’ process
of the bureaucratic apparatus and it seems that the answer lies on a case-
by-case or a sectorial basis in each country. Empirical research about
ministerial involvement in British agencies shows that situations vary
significantly: ‘The key determinant of the extent of ministerial involve-
ment appears to be the political sensitivity of the work of the agency,
rather than agency status as such’ (Hogwood, Judge and McVicar, 2001:
40). Structural changes cannot modify political priorities.
Another point is that many independent variables may influence a
policy result which cannot be itself entirely determinant on the level
of citizens’ electoral satisfaction. This is a serious impediment in any
political and political science attempt to link policy accomplishments
and political success. If operational results lead to some serious budget
savings, politicians may demonstrate that they are good managers of the
tax-payers’ money but they cannot escape the strategic choice they face
in determining the future use of these savings. If policy problems arise,
it is highly unlikely that users will criticize only bureaucrats, especially
at the local level where politicians are easy to contact. In any case, the
‘political job’ has not faded away: it would be political suicide for politi-
cians to ignore or reject the human dimension of policy failures and just
say ‘go and see the manager.’ Generally, no doctrine has been elaborated
about policy roles even in countries such as the UK where managerial
decentralization processes have been pushed to their limits.
Two questions may be asked in order to summarize the evolution of
policy roles: first, have politicians restrained themselves from any inter-
vention outside the sphere of general strategic or budget choices? Of
course, the answer is no. Politicians’ interventions have become more
frequent with the rise of international security problems and terrorism,
with the tremendous political impact of technological or health crises
and, last but not least, with the threat of a financial collapse. On the
other hand, have higher civil servants adopted a pure managerialist
328 Luc Rouban
role understanding? Again, the answer is no. Senior officials have given
strong attention to financial results and performance because they share
an economic interpretation of the modern state action with politi-
cians and, partially, because they are more and more involved person-
ally through performance bonuses in the good management of their
organization even in countries such as France. On the whole, there is
no evidence that higher civil servants have given up their policy expert
role. We are confronted here with the inner social hierarchy of each
national bureaucracy. As far as senior officials come from the middle
classes (generally the case in Italy, Netherlands or the Nordic countries),
their professional ethos is compatible with technical values, whether
legal or managerial. This is not the case in countries such as Germany,
France or Spain where senior officials have been trained since their early
years in legal or public administration schools to become leaders and,
if they have the opportunity to do so, to blend into the political class.
In those countries, public management is regarded with some disdain
as a set of tools for technicians. Therefore, the evolution toward public
management is a source of major tension within the higher civil service
because it leads us to distinguish those who will be still moving from one
ministry to the other, implementing management plans and advising
the ministers for strategic choices, from those who will be attached to
one agency, trying day after day to maximize their budgets savings and
to moderate social conflicts with skeptical and ill-paid employees. The
differentiation of policy roles is certainly more important within the
higher civil service itself than between elected politicians and senior
bureaucrats. This may explain why in some countries the traditional
‘mandarins’ have not opposed managerial reforms. This is the case, for
instance, in France because the first NPM reforms made in the 2000s
paradoxically reinforced the social weight of the grands corps members
while reducing the professional opportunities and prospects of those
who are not members of these corps and have to play the managerial
game (Rouban, 2007).
This is not to say that NPM reforms have not changed anything
within the policy role distribution. One obvious effect in most European
countries is the concentration of central executive power in the prime
minister’s office or the finance ministry with the centralization of finan-
cial information and the organization of politicized networks of advisers
(Peters, Rhodes and Wright, 2000). Generally, the finance ministry
has taken over the NPM reforms management process, depriving the
traditional ‘civil service offices’ from their power, while the various
policy committees in the prime minister’s office have been given the
Political-Administrative Relations 329
BE DE DK FI FR GR NL PT SE SP UK
Among civil 14 9 26 17 5 3 27 2 25 4 12
servants
Among other 10 7 24 18 7 2 23 2 22 5 8
citizens
4 Conclusion
Bibliography
Alba, Carlos (1998) ‘Politique et administration en Espagne: continuité historique
et perspectives,’ Revue Française d’Administration Publique, 86, 229–241.
Battini, Stefano (1998) ‘Administration et politique en Italie: des logiques contra-
dictoires,’ Revue Française d’Administration Publique, 86, 205–217.
332 Luc Rouban
1 Introduction
In the administrative state of the 20th century, career civil servants have
come to occupy a role that far surpasses that of their predecessors and
that has resulted in increased attention for the relation between polit-
ical and administrative actors at institutional (i.e. political-administra-
tive system) and actor levels (i.e. political-administrative relations). In
its design the project on Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective
(CSSCP) included attention for the role and position of politics and of
politicians in relation to administrative reform. Given the primacy of
politics and the practice of administrative authority (Raadschelders and
Stillman, 2007), we must consider the extent to which administrative
and civil service reforms require attention for reform of (elements of)
the political system.
As far as the Western world is concerned, the intensity and nature
of public sector reform is consistently assessed as having intensified
since World War II (Caiden, 1969), and especially since the early 1970s
(Barzelay, 2001; Peters and Pierre, 2001: 1) when more incremental
changes gave way to turbulence and transformation from the early 1980s
on (Nolan, 2001: xix). Indeed, the rapid, systemic changes of the 1990s
are expected to continue for decades (Baker, 2002: 10). Fewer authors
334
Political System Reform 335
seems to be a non-issue in the Western world and then explore the ques-
tion of political reform’s conditionality for and/or complementarity to
administrative reform. It is important to realize that politics can be an
independent variable (i.e. political system as environment to bureauc-
racy) but can also be a dependent variable (i.e. political-administrative
relations) (Sections 5 and 6). In the concluding section we will suggest
some avenues for further research.
There are various ways in which (a particular aspect of) public sector
reforms are (is) conceptualized, including: a model of output paradoxes
Political System Reform 337
attention (e.g. Baker, 2002; Braibanti, 1969; Dwivedi and Mishra, 2012;
Hyden, 2012; Linz and Stepan, 1996; Moore, 1966; Nef, 2012; Olowu,
2012; Schneider and Heredia, 2003; Skocpol, 1979; Suwaj, 2012; Verheijen,
2012). In the stable democracies of the Western world such system-wide
reforms are less considered simply because they would upset too much of
the existing arrangement without assurance that something better will
come in place. However, European integration is a process that has major
influence upon national constitutions and legislation, and has had far-
reaching consequences for member states’ sovereignty. Partial constitu-
tional-level reforms are not uncommon, as is illustrated by the effort in the
Netherlands to make the mayor an elective rather than appointive office.
It required a change in the Constitution but failed to pass the Senate.
This effort would have had little consequence for the civil service system.
An example of not formal but most probably actual constitutional-level
reforms in the Netherlands, with more significant consequences for the
civil service system, is the so-called dualization program in municipal and
provincial government that aims at strengthening political control by
the representative organs over the executive and its bureaucracy. Finally,
speculative debates on, for example, the end of the nation-state suggest
the possibility of changes in the political-administrative environment
the effects of which on the constitutional level cannot yet be adequately
assessed (Albrow, 1996; Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden, 2001).
Collective-level reforms have mainly been investigated in terms of
(1) changes in political-administrative relations at the top in the Western
world and (2) managerial reforms in the Western and non-Western
worlds. With regard to actor reforms most attention, as far as Western
countries are concerned, has been given to reforming civil servants’
behavior. Examples of such reforms include professionalization of the
civil service, and especially integrity and ethics programs for civil serv-
ants (Gregory, 2001; Van Blijswijk et al., 2004). While these reforms may
not directly affect political-administrative relations, they do increase
pressure upon the political system to pay attention to issues of profes-
sionalism and integrity among their own (see also below).
In this section we will discuss actual and suggested reforms of the polit-
ical system in terms of the constitutional, collective and operational
levels mentioned above, because it captures more than when only using
models of reform (such as the New Public Management, the neo-We-
berian, and the New Public Governance models; see Christensen and
Lægreid, 2012).
service reforms that will remove their patronage influence over bureauc-
racy (Schneider and Heredia, 2003: 15). In the case of Latin America,
it is not so easy to move beyond the patrimonialism, clientelism and
centralist tradition of colonial and (later) presidential dominance (Nef,
2012: 644, 647). In Southern Asian countries it has proven to be difficult
to overcome the viceregal legacy of a dominant political executive that
operates with a powerful bureaucracy (Dwivedi and Mishra, 2012: 628).
After independence many African countries shed the imposed classical
Weberian state and moved to a patronage-based system that is overcen-
tralized (Olowu, 2012: 609, 625). Finally, the events in the Middle East
since 2011 known as the Arab Spring seem to indicate a popular desire
toward more democracy. How influential these uprisings are remains to
be seen. Will they or will they not lead to reforms of the patrimonial
system that has been in place for centuries?
Why is it usually assumed that it is the civil servants who are in need
of reform but not the ministers or other politicians who may hope to
become ministers in due course? This is not to advocate some modern
version of Platonic guardians and neither, certainly, is it a plea for
Members of Parliament to be forced to take MBA’s. However, it is
to suggest that the preparation of politicians for high office has, in
many countries, been a ‘no-go’ area for reformers for too long. (Pollitt
and Bouckaert, 2000: 147; italics in original)
Could it be that lack of attention for political reforms has indeed rele-
gated politics to a fairly minor role so that bureaucracy has become
the main source of government policy (see the motto at the opening
of this chapter)? Also possible is that the legislator’ increased attention
for short-term and quick interventions have left the development of a
Political System Reform 343
Looking for an analytical frame that captures all public sector reforms
(see Introduction), in this section we devise an analytical and normative
framework to facilitate the study of administrative reform as conditioned
and/or complemented by political reform, with the latter potentially
being an independent (i.e. political system) as well as a dependent vari-
able (political officeholders as a component in political-administrative
relations).
Discussing the relation between political and administrative system
reform in terms of balancing implies a criterion crucial to such a balance.
Political System Reform 345
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Political System Reform 353
1 Introduction
354
Civil Servants in the Enabling Framework 355
widely. Civil service systems thus need to be – and indeed are – conceived
as integral parts of larger systems of governance. Does this change the
nature and our understanding of civil service systems? To structure an
answer to this question we will use the four elements of the definition
of civil service system at the beginning of this chapter (mobilization,
human resources, in service of, the state). When reflecting upon these
four elements, we will use and refer to observations made by the authors
in this volume. Also, questions with regard to the individual chapters
that were raised in the opening chapter have been addressed by the
various authors and will, thus, not be duplicated in this chapter. The
central issue in this final chapter is to find an answer to the question of
how both governance and NPM approaches contribute to a perspective
that fits contemporary needs.
reform. The Court is currently leading the debate about the question of
what the meaning of core public services is in the EU context. Are these
public services so distinct that labor laws are necessarily separate from
such laws that constrain private sector employment?
The widening mobilization strategies have in some Western nations
led to a call for ‘normalization’ of civil service provisions, procedures (e.g.
Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands). ‘Normalization’ refers to efforts of
standardizing, that is, normalizing, labor law conditions for the public
and private sectors alike. In other words, separate labor laws are to be
abolished. These laws mainly concern labor relations and conditions. In
the EU context, these facilitate the free mobility of people, goods and
services, that is, the utmost openness in recruitment policies and mobi-
lization strategies in a cross-national setting. But, internationalization –
even in the context of the EU – has not progressed to such a degree that
the state as a legal, cultural and political entity clearly demarcated from
other societal institutions has ceased to exist. Thus the European Court
faces the need to search for the limits to this ‘normalization’ by identi-
fying the distinctiveness of ‘publicness’ or the ‘public domain’ as a basis
for member-state-bound and -controlled recruitment and mobilization
policies within core public institutions.
It is likely, if not inevitable, that this search for the distinctiveness of
the public domain will be the basis for differentiating public labor rela-
tions and public personnel policies from private sector arrangements
(Rouban). This not only implies a distinction between ‘public’ and
‘private’ personnel in human resource (mobilization) policies but also
involves a distinction between people ‘working for the state’ (i.e. public
employees) and people working ‘in the (public) service of the state’ (i.e.
civil servants), where the latter constitutes a special but not necessarily
‘higher’ or ‘lower’ category. Interestingly we can observe this develop-
ment already at the local level of governance, historically the breeding
place of innovation and institutional adaptation to changing techno-
logical, economic, social and political circumstances.
The notion of the civil service is often closely associated with the
national level of governance (Kuhlman, Veit and Bogumil). This is not
surprising at the end of an era during which the building of a demo-
cratic nation-state had been the core mission of institutions of govern-
ance (which includes civil service systems). Current developments,
conveniently summarized with the catchwords of internationalization,
informatization (more about this below), individualization and cross-
culturalization, have increased the awareness of the multi-level nature
of all systems of governance. Local personnel policies have traditionally
Civil Servants in the Enabling Framework 359
It seems that most developments and changes in civil service systems have
occurred or are about to occur in the domain of the mobilization strategies
of and within civil service systems. It is interesting to note that the discus-
sion and analysis in most contributions circle around a rather limited
number of strategic human resources, which are well known from classical
bureaucracy theory: human intelligence, evidence-based (scientific) knowl-
edge, certified expertise, and a capacity to organize. Professionalization
and authority in the context of civil service systems are still expected to
be served by the mobilization and use of impartially applied, tested and
trusted knowledge and adequate and intelligently applied information. At
the same time, Perry has pointed out the importance of Public Service
Motivation as a driving force. At first sight, it seems that an old Weberian
acquaintance such as Dienstwissen – knowledge gathered and acquired
during a career – has become less important as a source of authority and
intelligence. Internal recruitment, promotion based on seniority, and the
value of a stable long-term career as a civil servant seem to have become less
valued and have given way to a preference for flexibility, innovation, job
circulation and an interchange across public and private sectors (Lægreid
and Wise). However, while often advocated, few successful transfers from
the private to the public sector actually seem to occur. And one may wonder
whether the search for certification and ‘competency management’ actu-
ally is not the 21st-century version of (the certification of) Dienstwissen,
now basically supposed to have been acquired in (lifelong) trails across
relevant policy networks or institutional ‘chains’ of governance and not in
internal labor markets and intra-organizational careers.
Is it not striking that the traditional civil service resource of reliable
and practical knowledge of the details of the governmental process is still
highly valued, or at least longed for, in the transformational process toward
a Rechtsstaat that characterizes non-Western administrative systems
in so many regions of the world (Verheijen and Rabrenovich; Burns;
Adamolekun and Olowu)? Transformational processes in the Western
362 Jos C.N. Raadschelders et al.
world (Van der Meer, Steen and Wille; Halligan) have been summarized
by the concept of ‘hollow state’ (Frederickson and Frederickson, 2006).
At first sight the ‘hollow state’ seems capable of transferring many execu-
tive and public policy delivery functions to outside the domain of the
civil service, that is, towards the broader and partially commercialized
public service domain. At the same time, all kinds of large-scale devel-
opments in, for example, international migration, internal and external
security, climate change, food safety and epidemiology seem to bring
along a discussion of strategic physical resources that need to be under
the direct and immediate command of the civil service system. Civil
service systems seem to face a new round of core business discussions,
now not so much from the perspective of economy and efficiency, but
from the perspective of robustness, resilience and sustainability.
A notion that clearly has been changing is that of the desirability
of the faceless bureaucrat as a valued resource. We are entering a new
debate on the universal desirability of ‘transparency’ as the ultimate
good in the public sector versus the value of secrecy and confidenti-
ality as important resources for an effective civil service system. It is
clear that the development of the multimedia society and the world
wide web enhanced the visibility and therefore ‘publicness’ of formerly
hidden or confidential components of the civil service. In the years
since the first edition of this volume was published, the informa-
tion revolution has accelerated rapidly. Governments are increasingly
using ‘big data’ and the number of conferences on the relevance of
big data for biometrics, for the defense industry, for the protection
against domestic and foreign terrorism, and so forth, has been on the
rise in the past two to four years. One of the main challenges facing
civil servants is how to deal with this flood of data. It is known that
stockbrokers on the trading floor respond rapidly to tweets and make
too quick a decision. In a recent study, MIT professor Alex Pentland
wondered whether (Western) societies are spinning out of control as
a consequence of the hyperuse of social media (2013). His advice is to
slow down the spread of ideas, so that we make some time to think
through and reflect upon which actions are best. A related challenge
to civil servants is that the torrent of information creates various
challenges in the existing IT systems, including: the presence of a
large number of disparate information management systems, little
integration or coordination between different information systems,
lack of strategic direction for the overall technology environment,
poor quality of information (e.g. lack of consistency, duplication,
out-of-date information), and limited support from senior managers
for developing IT policy (Melchor, 2013: 28).
Civil Servants in the Enabling Framework 363
are motivated by incomplete and narrow perspectives and that they are
not thought through with regard to their impact upon other compo-
nents of the public realm. If we are to consider reforming the civil service
system’s role and position in the 21st century we need a more sophis-
ticated Hegelian/neo-Weberian approach that acknowledges, first, that
one size does not fit all, second, that reforms build upon existing insti-
tutional capacities, third, where reforms are supported beyond political
rhetoric (Widner, 2006: 6, 8, 12), and, fourth, where reforms do not stop
at tinkering with only one component of the entire multi-level govern-
ance system (Raadschelders and Bemelmans-Videc).
The 21st-century civil servant is not a passionless, faceless imple-
mentor of political will, but one who substantively contributes to public
policy and service delivery on the basis of a deeply understood service
to the citizenry, that is, general will, that is safeguarded by an equally
deep understanding of the importance of balancing due process and
equality before the law with efficient and effective professionalism. In
other words, the civil servant is the crucial actor of, for, and in the 21st-
century enabling framework state.
References
Carpenter, Daniel P. (2001) The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations,
Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press).
Du Gay, Paul (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber – Organization – Ethics (London:
Sage).
Frederickson, David G. and H. George Frederickson (2006) Measuring the Performance
of the Hollow State (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press).
Gale, Scott A. and Ralph P. Hummel (2003) ‘A Debt Unpaid – Reinterpreting Max
Weber on Bureaucracy,’ Administrative Theory & Praxis, 25, 409–418.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
370 Jos C.N. Raadschelders et al.
371
372 Index