Civil Service Research Paper

1. History

There were bureaucratic administrators long before they were known as ‘civil servants.’ Historical antecedents can be found mainly in centralized States and empires where public bureaucracies were developed to serve the rulers, or the dynasty. Despite their subservience to the emperors and kings, however, these bureaucracies became ‘professional,’ that is, they manifested some conception of themselves as servants of the ‘state,’ the polity, or even the community (Eisenstadt 1965). Such embryonic civil service institutions existed in different forms first in the Egypt and China empires, and later, for instance, in the Byzantine, Sassanid, Abbasid, and Ottoman empires. Sculptures of the ancient Egyptian scribes date back to the Old Kingdom (ca. 2600 ). They belonged to a body of officials who served the Kingdom, as did their Assyrian and Babylonian counterparts. Even more professional were the ancient Chinese functionaries employed in the rather developed court machinery. These officials—whose rank was conspicuously exhibited by the shape and color of the buttons worn on their caps—became much later known in the West as ‘mandarins.’ The term is often used pejoratively to indicate the aloofness of civil servants, the official jargon and the sheltered life of their long careers.

Broadly speaking, the history of public administration testifies that there has always been a need to link state (or ruler) goals, with the official expertise of a centralized bureaucracy. These bureaucratic entities were engaged in three main types of activities: tech nical services such as land registration or water allocation; social and political regulation such as administrating justice or collecting taxes; and above all—managing war-related affairs (Finer 1997, Vol. 1, pp. 59–72).

The European patterns of the civil service have emerged gradually from the Greek and especially the Roman law and administrative traditions, of, for example, public construction, food supply regulation, and population census. They were later influenced by the medieval feudal system of financial and judicial administration. Yet, the most strenuous collective effort has always been related to mobilizing money, soldiers, and equipment for the military. Accordingly, throughout the history of most countries, organizational practices, public and private, have been influenced directly by the most readily available example—the military model. This model was further developed to encompass the colonial expansion of some European countries, which required new organizational expertise, both in content and in scope. The influence of the military is most readily seen through such administrative concepts as ‘chain of command,’ or ‘line and staff,’ so much so that recent attempts to debureaucratize the civil service are essentially an attempt to break away from the dominance of the military bureaucratic model.

2. The Modern Civil Service

The emergence of the modern civil service is connected directly to the crystallization of the European style state, first in France and Prussia and later in all the 200 or so states that populate the globe in the early twentyfirst century. As an institution the civil service dates back to the middle seventeenth century with the inauguration of competence entrance examinations in Prussia under Friedrich Wilhelm I, analogous to the old Chinese practice. Equally important, the German Cameralists were the first modern scholars–practitioners to study public administration and to offer a set of principles for the ‘management of the state’ (Gross 1964, Vol. I, p. 108). The next stages in the development of the civil service were diffused, but a few milestones can be presented, all of them related to the attempt to create an institutional instrument with acquired experience in running state affairs. The dissimilar features should also be noted as each civil service is also a product of its particular environment, and the human composition of each of them reflects recurring attempts of social groups to enter the ruling elites of their respective states.

2.1 The Napoleonic Reforms Early Nineteenth Century

The Napoleonic Reforms converted the previous French royal service into a State public service. France, and before that Prussia, created the continental model of a professional, tenured and in-house trained civil servant. More than in other countries, continental civil servants embody the state, and the continuity of state affairs, and operate within a specific legal framework of administrative law (Crozier 1964, Suleiman 1974).

2.2 The Northcote–Trevelyan Report 1854

This report introduced competitive examinations into the British civil service and uniform methods of recruitment and promotion across departments. It eventually succeeded in eliminating patronage. Making it a professional life career attracted the educated to enter the senior administrative class, which was given the task of shaping public policy and advising politically elected ministers. Below them were the executive and clerical classes, which were given managerial and routine responsibilities. The UK was the first to establish a civil service commission to oversee the entire operation of the civil service. Politically neutral and very secretive, the British senior home civil service acquired a reputation of integrity and impartiality, and of being guardians of crown affairs, as distinct from the governments of the day.

2.3 The Pendelton Act 1883

The Pendelton Act in the USA marked the beginning of federal civil service reform, aimed at abolishing the previous ‘spoils system’ in the central government. Patronage in the federal government was closely related to electoral turnovers in the Presidency and Congress. Unlike the UK, the American system has never achieved the same degree of uniformity, political neutrality, or continuity. In the USA, however, the civil service has been much more open, with recruitment to the senior positions, less dependent on social class and on elite education systems. Consequently, the civil service has never had the aura of ‘officialism’ as in Europe, and has not acquired the prestige and the consequent status of being a permanent agent of the federal state.

2.4 Nondemocratic Regimes

In nondemocratic regimes the position of the civil service institution is related directly to the scope of the state’s monopoly of the different spheres of life. The stronger the state, the more dominant is the public bureaucracy—operating sometimes from the ruler’s palace, the military barracks, or the party’s headquarters. In such regimes, the civil service hardly exists as a differentiated professional institution. In the Soviet Union, for example, the lines between state and party bureaucracies, and indeed between political and administrative decisions, were practically nonexistent. In this respect, the most troubling phenomenon appeared with the total submission of the highly developed German civil service (including the military and the judicial) to Nazi leaders. This raises the question: Can there be safeguards against turning professional competence—and loyalty—into a sharp tool in the hands of evil political masters?

2.5 New States

In the New States the civil service is a mixture of colonial heritage and unique local elements. In India, and in some other former British colonies, the civil service is a strong institution, and it helps to keep the country going, despite recurring crises and accusations that it impedes development. In many other new countries, particularly where the military took over, the civil service hardly functions. It cannot maintain law and order, let alone carry the task of providing social services. The weaker the state grows, the more helpless is the civil service institution, and the weaker the civil service, the less the ability to sustain stability and encourage positive changes.

3. The Rational Model

Max Weber (1864–1920), one of the most prominent students of bureaucracy, delineated three ‘ideal-types’ of legitimate authority—the legal-rational, the traditional, and the charismatic, and suggested that the first one requires the existence of a ‘rational’ administrative staff. Strongly influenced by the Prussian example, Weber drew a list of the characteristics of a modern bureaucracy and the conditions that contributed to its emergence and growth, particularly in capitalist market economies (Weber 1947). His ideas reflected, and to some extent strengthened, the heavy reliance—both in continental Europe and in the USA—of civil service institutions upon administrative law: legal codes, rules, regulations, and precedents. To this very day the notable exception is the UK which (unlike Canada, Australia and its other former dominions) does not have a civil service act of Parliament and does not require legislation to change its public administration system.

The rational (‘Weberian’) model of the civil service as a permanent institution also includes the following common features, which are assumed to exist in the public bureaucracies of the developed states: the centralization of authority; formal modes of operation; a central commission or agency in charge of civil service affairs; established procedures for recruitment, tenure, promotion, compensation, job evaluation, discipline, and the right to associate and strike; and arrangements for securing political neutrality. In addition, civil servants must adhere to a special code of conduct which specifies their obligations, and constitutes the ethos (or perhaps the myth) of impersonality, neutrality, and guardianship of state secrets.

The important point about the rational model of the civil service is that there is a connection between the development of the modern state and this new form of bureaucratic organization. Indeed, in the twentieth century the civil service and the entire public sector expanded rapidly in response to growing roles of the state, particularly with the growth of the welfare state. Governments and their civil service apparatus have been asked to provide more services and to find answers to new problems such as environmental degradation. But at the same time, the ‘administrative’ or ‘bureaucratic’ state has also come under attack, in terms of the size, structure, and functions of the civil service. New post-Weberian questions have been floated: to whom should the civil service be responsive and accountable: to the state, the law, the government of the day, the multicultured conglomeration of sectors and groups, or perhaps to the individual customers of its services?

4. What Do Civil Servants Do?

Civil servants are in charge of a rich menu of government activities ranging from artificially ‘seeding clouds’ in the sky to induce rainfall, to operating schools, or administrating programs for the increasing number of aged people. In between, civil servants, as in ancient times, continue to collect taxes and perform state functions that cannot be trusted to, or done by, social (voluntary) or private market institutions. These various activities can be grouped under the following headings: shaping and implementing public policy decisions; providing services to individuals, groups and organizations; and administrating regulatory schemes in areas such as aviation, drugs, and election financing.

The main structural entities for carrying out these activities could be divided roughly into three (a) the regular civil service departments and agencies— responsible for the generic governmental functions; (b) the special statutory agencies, authorities, commissions, etc.—responsible for specific tasks removed from the regular civil service, (e.g., the USA Securities and Exchange Commission); and (c) government corporations entrusted with running utilities and other commercial enterprises regarded as natural monopolies or in some other way related to national interests (e.g., postal services, public broadcasting, electricity companies, and regional development projects). The combinations of the various types of activities and the different structures reflect the myriad and ever-changing scope of civil service responsibilities.

It is impossible to prescribe the right number of civil servants per capita, given the differences in their functions, and in the number of intra-state governmental levels in different states. In economically developed states, the tendency is to cut down the scope of civil service activities (and consequently its size too) through privatization, outsourcing, etc. In new states the pressure still exists on the civil service to do much more for their hard-pressed societies.

5. Studying The Civil Service

Woodrow Wilson (1887) was among the pioneers who attempted to create ‘a practical science of administration,’ aimed at improving not only the personnel, but also the organization and methods of government offices. He saw the field of administration as a field of business which should be outside the sphere of politics. Hence his famous dictum: separate policy-making from administrative execution. But there were other scholarly currents as well. From the ‘scientific management’ movement in the USA (ca. 1900s) came the notion of ‘efficiency,’ aimed at increasing workers’ productivity through detailed time and motion studies, standardization of tools, and careful attention to training. From the ‘human relations’ school (ca. 1930s) came the message that in all organizations, individual and group motivations are the most important factors. A little later, and more directly applied to public administration, attempts were made to develop prescriptive principles. For instance, establish one top executive; fit people to organizational structures; ensure unity of command; use specialized staff; maintain homogeneity in organizational subdivisions; delegate authority; match responsibility with authority; and limit span of control (Gulick and Urwick 1937).

A change came with Herbert Simon’s (1946) attack on these principles which he regarded as being no more than ‘proverbs of administration.’ Simon’s concept of ‘bounded rationality’ that governs the life of all organizations, was an important step away from prescriptions towards observations, and from practical advice on how to run organizations, to laying the foundation of public administration theory and of a comparative perspective. First came the formal studies of the civil service as an institution within the executive branch, or in the context of administrative law. Later, mainly as a result of the impact of studies in political science, the context as well as the horizon were expanded, away from the previous formalism. For example: power, group theory, and communication were introduced into the vocabulary of public administration research. More recently, the related area of public policy has emerged with new emphasis on economic models and game theory, as well as on the redefinition of values, public goods, and the role of politics in decision-making (Majone 1989). New foci were introduced such as implementation, social regulation, and comparative policy analysis in areas such as welfare, health, and environment (Goodin and Klindermann 1996, pp. 551–641).

The most challenging and inadequently researched new area has remained the role of the civil service institution in democracies. This is a practical issue as well: how to reform the civil service within a new democratic framework in the era of state weakening (Silberman 1993).

6. Blurring The Boundaries Of The Civil Service

The modern version of the state is changing rapidly, and if there is going to be a ‘skeleton state,’ there will be a skeleton civil service as well. This process has been gradually occurring both because of internal changes such as the weakening of pubic trust in political institutions, and under the impact of globalization. In the early 2000s there are states still struggling to build a British-type civil service (which does not exist in the UK anymore); other states in which few changes have taken place in their public bureaucracies; and economically-rich states in which the role of the civil service is visibly contracting. There are also new supra-state bureaucracies, not only in international organizations such as the European Union, but also in inter-state agencies and in joint public management of regional projects. These developments have shattered many of the old features of the classical Weberian-type civil service.

Examples:

(a) Civil service monopoly on official information is no longer feasible and government secrecy has yielded to freedom of information acts enacted in most democratic states (Galnoor 1989).

(b) With modern information technology and multichannel communication, civil servants’ anonymity (and perhaps discretion too) has been gradually disappearing.

(c) The previous civil service—interest groups network, has been replaced by a much more intricate and uncontrollable system of organization in the mushrooming ‘third sector’ (nongovernmental, nonprofit) of public interest groups, NGO’s, and philanthropic funds.

(d) The civil service is under great pressure to be more ‘representative’ in its membership, or at least to assist in achieving equal opportunity through ‘affirmative action’ and other measures.

(e) Direct accountability of the civil service to the public is demolishing the last walls of insulation. One example is the spread of the Swedish Ombudsman institution. Another is the authority given to special investigation commissions to probe the decision-making discretion of public officials.

These developments were followed by important changes in some of the traditional features of the civil service. For example, in many states the civil service is no longer a life career and new opportunities for entrance to (and exit from) senior positions have been introduced. The emphasis on management skills has downgraded the policy-advice roles of civil servants. The results-oriented business approach has diverted attention to the quality of service aspect, including the idea that civil servants should be rewarded according to their standing in customers’ satisfaction surveys.

In states where New Public Management (NPM) reforms were was introduced, a new post-public bureaucracy model is slowly emerging. It requires questioning many assumptions about the civil service—both in scholarship and in practice (Peters and Wright 1996). The most important change in this respect is in the blurring of the old boundaries between the public and private sectors, and between politics and administration.

The first blurred boundary was pointed out long ago by Merriam (1944): the civil service has constituencies, and in many countries corporations exert a great deal of influence on public policy. However, with increased regulation, the private sector became even more involved, and hence the phenomenon of excessive clientelism (Nadel and Rourke 1975). Moreover, as part of the process of ‘reshaping the state,’ the size, structure, and functions of the civil service are under attack. Independent public and private entities and agencies are performing what used to be civil service tasks such as postal services. Other functions have been ‘privatized,’ ‘marketed,’ or ‘outsourced’ to the private sector: running prisons, computer services, or even recruitment to the civil service itself.

As for the politics–administration dichotomy, for many years it disappeared from public administration textbooks. Everybody knew that civil servants exercise state power both formally (law application) and informally (policy shaping). However, starting in the 1980s the distinction returned as part of NPM. The new textbooks dealing with the civil service are now called ‘introduction to public sector management,’ and the civil service is conceived to be market-oriented, customer-driven, deregulated, decentralized, etc. Thus the old Wilsonian dichotomy has returned through the back door: an institutional separation within the civil service between the ‘departments’ in charge of policy and the ‘performance-based organizations’ or ‘executive agencies’ responsible for delivering services to customers.

Bibliography:

1. Aberbach J D, Putnam R D, Rockman B A 1981 Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
2. Barnard C 1938. The Functions of the Executive. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
3. Crozier M 1964 The Bureaucratic Phenomenon. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
4. Dror Y 1971 Design for Policy Sciences. Elsevier, New York
5. Eisenstadt S N 1965 Essays in Comparative Institution. Wiley, New York
6. Finer S E 1997 The History of Government From the Earliest Times. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
7. Heady F 1979 Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective, 2nd edn. Marcel Dekker, New York
8. Hood C 1999 Regulation Inside Government. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
9. Galnoor I 1989 Government Secrecy. In: International Encyclopedia of Communications. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 34–7
10. Goodin R E, Klingemann H-D (eds.) 1996 Public policy and administration. In A New Handbook of Political Science. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 551–641
11. Gross B M 1964 The Managing of Organizations. The Free Press, New York
12. Gulick L, Urwick L (eds.) 1937 Papers on the Science of Administration. Institute of Public Administration, New York
13. Majone G 1989 Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in the Policy Process. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
14. Merriam C E 1944 Public and Private Government. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
15. Nadel M V, Rourke F E 1975 Bureaucracies. In: Greenstein F I, Polsby N W (eds.) Handbook of Political Science. AddisonWesley, Reading, MA, 5: 373–440
16. O’Donnell G 1973 Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
17. Peters B G, Wright V 1996 Public policy and administration: Old and new. In: Goodin R E, Klingemann H-D (eds.) A New Handbook of Political Science. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 628–41
18. Pressman J L, Wildavsky A 1984 Implementation, 3rd edn. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
19. Silberman B 1993 Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the United States and Great Britain. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
20. Simon H A 1946 The proverbs of administration. Public Administration Review 6: 53–67
21. Simon H A 1957 Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations, 2nd edn. Macmillan, New York
22. Suleiman E N 1974 Politics, Power and Bureaucracy in France. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
23. Weber M 1947 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Oxford University Press, New York
24. Wildavsky A 1987 Speaking Truth to Power. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ
25. Wilson J O 1989 Bureaucracy. Basic Books, New York
26. Wilson W 1887 The study of administration, Political Science Quarterly 2: 197–222