Politics of Bureaucracy

B. Guy Peters, Guy Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134648160
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Routledge is proud to publish the fifth edition of this comprehensive, comparative exploration of the political and policy-making roles of public bureaucracies in nations around the world. Written by a leading authority in the field, it offers an extensive, well documented, comparative analysis stressing the effects of politics and organised interests on bureaucracy. New to the fifth edition: *a new chapter on administrative reform *more material on administration in developing countries *more coverage of the European Union and more discussion of international bureaucracies *revision and up-dating to take into account the wealth of new literature that has emerged in recent years.

Chapter 1


The persistence, growth and change of government and administration

The modern public sector

The growth of government

The growth of administration

Countertrends in government growth

Summary

Notes

I began my introduction to this book with the statement that government has become a pervasive fact of everyday life and that, in addition, public administration has become an especially pervasive aspect of government. This statement remains true despite the long terms in office of a number of Conservative governments in many industrialized nations (Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the United States, Margaret Thatcher and then John Major in the United Kingdom, Helmut Kohl in West Germany). These governments were joined later by right-of-center governments in unlikely places such as Sweden.

More recently, governments on the political left have returned to power in most industrialized democracies, but they are not the same types of social democrats as in the past.¹ Most of these governments have accepted many of the same premises about the need to reduce the size of government, and have made concerted attempts to reduce the role of government in the lives of their citizens. Bill Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the United Kingdom have both pledged to keep government small while, at the same time, using government as a positive instrument to improve the lives of their citizens. Social Democratic governments all over Europe, with the possible exception of France, have adopted some of the same rhetoric of the “Third Way,” albeit in varying degrees. Government is not the enemy that it once was, but neither is there much acceptance of the “tax and spend” behavior of left governments in the past.²

What is true for the industrialized democracies is especially true for countries of the former communist bloc, and for many countries of the Third World. These political systems have undergone almost total transformations of their governmental structures, and, particularly in the former communist systems, there is often a need felt to reduce the intrusiveness of government and to permit greater personal freedom – economically as well as politically. These changes in values have been accompanied by radical transformations of the public sector. The changes have included numerous public enterprises being privatized and public employment being downsized.

Despite the best efforts of political leaders, however, an enhanced role for the public sector appears to persist in many countries, and in some cases that role even continues to increase. Leaders of governments have usually found government more difficult to control than they had believed before taking office. This chapter will attempt to document briefly the generalization – if indeed any documentation is required – that the public sector is difficult to control and even more difficult to “roll back.” Indeed, as the state is rolled back in some ways it almost inevitably must “roll forward” in others. Privatizing industries – especially public utilities – will mean that those industries will have to be regulated in some way to ensure that the public is treated fairly.³ The large-scale privatization occurring in Eastern Europe has meant that legal principles like property rights and contracts, as well as regulatory mechanisms, must be created by government. In other countries, where the central government has assumed a smaller role in society, lower tiers of government have accepted enhanced roles, and in some cases whole new tiers of government have been created.⁴ In all of these cases, governments remain involved in the economy and society, just in less obvious ways.

The growth and contraction of government have become objects of scholarly research. Attempts to change the size of government have also become a rallying cry for political activity, whether the attempt is to expand or to contract the public sector. Any number of explanations have been offered for the growth and persistence of the public sector. Likewise, the expansion of the public bureaucracy has been conceptualized as either a by-product of the general growth in the public sector or as a root cause of that growth. Further, if government is not able to decrease its size and its influence in a society, the blame is often placed on an entrenched public bureaucracy. For example, the expanding role of the European Community in the daily lives of the citizens of the 12 member countries is often phrased in terms of expansionary ideas of the “Eurocrats.” The arguments concerning the expansion and blocking power of public bureaucracy are, however, too numerous to discuss effectively here.⁵

On the other hand it is important to place contemporary public administration in its political and intellectual context, and the increased concern about the magnitude and impact of government remains an important factor in shaping the current debate about the public sector and public administration. At home, governments seeking to provide better and more equitable services to the public must also be conscious of the resistance of the public to taxation. Internationally the international financial community is skeptical of a large public sector and exerts an influence through the bond and currency markets.

The modern public sector

The above paragraph was written as if the “size of government” could be clearly and unambiguously measured.⁶ In fact, it is a fundamental feature of contemporary government, especially in industrialized societies, that the boundaries between government and society – between what is public and what is private – are increasingly vague. As a consequence of that imprecision, any attempt to say unambiguously that government is growing or shrinking is subject to a great deal of error and misinterpretation. For example, by some measures the government in Russia would be larger in 2000 than it was prior to the collapse of the former system because taxes are now higher as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product than under communism.⁷

Further, the imprecision in measuring the size of the public sector can be utilized politically to make arguments about the successes or failures of incumbent governments to exercise proper control over the public sector. In an era of skepticism about the public sector and resistance to taxation, the issue of controlling the public sector is often important politically.⁸ Opposition politicians find it very convenient to argue that their opponents have let the public sector “run amok” and can usually muster some evidence to support that assertion. Likewise, incumbent politicians can gather their own evidence to demonstrate that they have indeed been good stewards of the public purse.

Several examples of the difficulties in measuring the size of the public sector may help to clarify this discussion. One obvious example is the role of the tax system in defining the impact of government on the economy and society – an impact that is not adequately assessed by most measures of the size of government. In the United States, for example, subsidies for housing through the tax system (primarily through the deductibility of mortgage interest and local property taxes) exceed direct government expenditures for public housing by more than 150 percent; this continues to be true even after the “tax reform” bill of 1986.⁹ Likewise, although the United Kingdom has had a large (albeit declining sharply) program of council (public) housing, tax relief for owner-occupied housing exceeds £1 billion.¹⁰ Similar tax concessions are available to citizens of the majority of industrialized countries, with some of the highest nominal tax rates (e.g. Sweden) accompanying some of the most generous tax concessions.¹¹ All of these tax loopholes influence economic behavior and amount to government’s influencing the economy and society just as if it taxed and spent for the same purposes.¹² Tax concessions are not, however, conventionally counted as part of the size of the public sector, as expenditures for the same purposes would be.

Government loans are another means through which government can influence the economy without ostensibly increasing the size of government. In the majority of industrialized countries governments make loans to nationalized industries that often are not repaid; these defaulted loans do not always show up as an item of public expenditure, however.¹³ Even loans to individual citizens, for example to farmers, or to small businesses, often are not counted as expenditures, given the assumption that eventually they will be repaid. The involvement of government is even more subtle when, as in the United States, governments offer guarantees for private loans to companies in financial difficulty or to students who want to go to college. Such arrangements involve the actual expenditure of little or no public money but, again, produce a significant effect in the economy.

Not only do expenditures and other uses of financial resources fall on the boundary between the public and private sectors, but organizations do as well. There has been a significant increase in the number of quasi-public organizations in most countries during the post-war era.¹⁴ In order to provide organizations with greater flexibility in making decisions, or to subject them to greater market discipline, or to protect them from potentially adverse political pressures, or simply to mask the true size of government, organizations have been created that straddle the public–private fence. In some instances these organizations are created anew as government enters a policy area for the first time – for example, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States. In other instances these are organizations that existed previously as a part of government but are then “hived-off” to a quasi-independent status, as many of the numerous non-departmental public bodies in the United Kingdom and Crown Corporations in Canada have been. As a part of the more radical reforms of the public sector undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of quasi-government organizations have been created that enable governments to pursue their policy goals while not appearing to be as “large” as in the past.

Table 1.1 Public expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product ^a

Table 1.2 Proportion of Gross Domestic Product derived from primary sector of economy (agriculture, forestry and fishing) (percentage)

In addition to the obvious measurement problems these quasi-governmental organizations create, they give rise to even more important problems of accountability. As they have been divorced from direct control by government to some extent, the conventional political and legal means for enforcing accountability (see Chapter 8) may no longer be applicable. The result is that these organizations (and the politicians who are responsible for them) have opportunities for abuse of powers.¹⁵ Further, given that they are at once public and private, the average citizen may find it difficult to ascertain who really is responsible for the services they provide. Somewhat paradoxically, as governments have sought to appear smaller and more efficient, the resultant confusion and perceived unaccountability may cause even greater harm to their reputations with the public.

Public spending

Although we now can see that it is difficult or impossible to measure the magnitude of government definitively, we can still gain insight into the changes that have taken place in the role of government by examining figures for public expenditure. This variable is the most widely used measure of the relative size of government and represents perhaps the most visible portions of governmental activity. A particular insight about the size of the public sector can be found in the relationship between government expenditure and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a standard measure of all the marketed goods and services produced in an economy.

Table 1.3 Public expenditure as a percentage of readily extractable Gross Domestic Product (secondary and tertiary sectors)

As can be seen in Table 1.1, there are marked differences among nations in the proportion of GDP devoted to public expenditure. The most obvious differences are between the less-developed and the industrialized nations. Even the less-developed country with the highest level of public expenditure (Kenya) spends much less as a proportion of GDP than does...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Chapter 1: The Persistence, Growth and Change of Government and Administration
• Chapter 2: Political Culture and Public Administration
• Chapter 3: The Recruitment of Public Administrators
• Chapter 4: Problems of Administrative Structure
• Chapter 5: Politics and Public Administration
• Chapter 6: The Politics of Bureaucracy
• Chapter 7: Paying for Government: The Budgetary Process
• Chapter 8: The Politics of Administrative Accountability
• Chapter 9: Administrative Reform
• Chapter 10: Public Administration In the Twenty-First Century