Comparative Civil Service Systems in the 21st Century

Kenneth A. Loparo, J. Raadschelders, T. Toonen, Kenneth A. Loparo, J. Raadschelders, T. Toonen, Frits M. Van der Meer, J. Raadschelders, T. Toonen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137491459
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This revised and expanded edition of a benchmark collection compares how civil services around the world have adapted to cope with managing public services in the 21st century. The volume provides insights into multi-level governance, juridification and issues of efficiency and responsiveness as well as exploring the impact of fiscal austerity.

1

Civil Service Systems and the Challenges of the 21st Century

Jos C.N. Raadschelders, Theo A.J. Toonen, and Frits M. Van der Meer

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 rejection 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 understanding in the scientific community with respect to the nature of these wide-ranging change processes, the analysis of the actual consequences for CSS has received less attention.

In this book various aspects of these challenges and change processes will be probed and the findings will serve as a basis for the final chapter. This publication is rooted in a research project, Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective, that started in 1990. Back then, empirically grounded and theoretical information was scarcely available on this topic (Bekke, Perry, and Toonen, 1996; Perry, 1999). This deficiency in empirical research was problematic given the widely perceived urgency to reform public services and this project was started to remedy this deficiency. The first phase was to develop an analytical framework to guide empirical research. In 1996 the first volume, Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective (edited by Hans Bekke, Jim Perry, and Theo Toonen), was published. It contained a conceptual framework for civil service research. It developed a neo-institutional approach that stressed the historical dimensions and the embeddedness of these systems within their particular political and societal contexts. On the basis of this framework (see also Raadschelders and Perry, 1994) the second phase of the project could start. This involved an examination of a large number of civil service systems. The results were published in a series of four comparative studies published by Edward Elgar on Central and Eastern Europe (Verheijen, 1999), Western Europe (Bekke and Van der Meer, 2000, Van der Meer 2nd edition 2011), Asia (Burns and Bowornwathana, 2001) and Anglo-American countries (Halligan, 2004). The consortium leading this research effort has been fortunate to attract scholars from all over the world. Only Africa was not included in the second phase of empirical studies (see on that continent, Adamolekun, 1999). We partially rectified this by including a chapter on Africa in the first volume (by Adamolekun) and in this edition (Adamolekun and Olowu). As for Latin America, two of the papers at the 1997 conference at Indiana University, Bloomington were published in 1999 (Perlman on Nicaragua, Oszlak on Argentina).

This updated volume still serves as the third phase of this project and offers reflections on developments in various world regions, seeks to identify the major challenges CSS will confront in the 21st century, and what this implies for these institutions. In this opening chapter we will provide a general introduction to pressures and challenges presently confronting CSS (Section 2). Central to this section is the discussion of the neo-institutional definition of civil service systems as used by Bekke et al. (1996) that analyzes CSS at three different levels and characterizes change in terms of processes of de- and re-institutionalization. We then discuss in more detail the four sections of this book and the various chapters in each (Section 3).

2 Pressures and challenges confronting civil service systems

Change, continuity, and diversity have characterized the development of the civil service in the past two centuries. It is most common to date the start of wide-ranging and profound changes in (mainly) the environment of government organizations in the early 1980s. These environmental changes necessitated or even dictated a fundamental overhaul and reforms of CSS (Ferlie, Lynn, and Pollitt 2005; Kickert, 1997; Peters and Pierre, 2000, 2001; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011).

The list of environmental changes is impressive. Internationally, they include the redesign of the global (economic) world order with the fall of many communist systems, the rise of new economies in developing countries, the growing effects of globalization, transnational economic and demographic movements, efforts at controlling cross-border movement and constraining, for instance, international terrorism, and since the late 2000s the banking, economic, and fiscal crises (for the distinction between these three types of crises, see Kickert, Randma-Liv, and Savi, 2013) that we only now, at the time of writing, seem to be slowly recovering from. These, though, are only a few among the many international change processes that diminish the dominance of the unified nation state (Farazmand and Pinkowski, 2006). However, we should also be aware of counter trends. Accelerated information exchange and increased accessibility of information have, paradoxically, made nations and world regions more aware of their differences. Indeed, while globalization made some fear the possibility of losing national and/or regional identity, a fairly strong popular sentiment, nothing of the sort has happened. Also, we have to remember that governments have always operated in an interdependent international environment and that globalization and state activity increased simultaneously. In that perspective globalization has not systematically undermined state control (Krasner, 2001: 234–236).

National environmental changes include ever-increasing calls and demands from a more active and educated citizenry asking for voice and tailor-made solutions to social problems, increased awareness of the influence of parallel societal and governmental decision centers, and rapid information exchange. Hence the suggestion that also nationally the (monopoly) position of central government is seriously undermined. At the same time, though, the existence of multiple policy- and decision-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 literature.¹ Since then, public administration scholars and political scientists have embraced this fashionable concept, and often more for its normative 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 occurrence 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 services 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 redundant, 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-private, private, and nonprofit actors in public service delivery. But this focus on horizontal relations and processes often overlooks the effects of power differences and the role that formal institutions and jurisdictions still play (Peters and Pierre, 2004).

In this chapter multi-level governance refers to the intertwinement of public decision making and service delivery mechanisms and actors at local, regional, and nationwide levels of government and society. Private actors, citizens, interest groups, enterprises, and so on are considered as important as public sector actors, although the latter continue to have the final authority to make binding decisions in matters of collective or societal interest. Some may suggest that multi-level governance directly strikes at the very existence of civil service systems, given public service delivery through policy networks, decentralized governance networks, public–private partnerships and a cooperation between non-governmental bodies, consultants, and government. Ipso facto, the unified bureaucratic career civil service is challenged and perhaps even approaching its demise.

A life without civil services and civil servants is difficult to conceive since public sector organizations need people. As Richard Rose observed: ‘public employees in very real sense put flesh on the barebones of government’ (quoted in Bekke and Van der Meer, 2000: 1). Who are these civil servants and in which institutional arrangements do they operate? Most discussions are to large degree focused on and often obsessed by a particular manifestation or even local definition of civil service. Some West European public administration scholars consider CSS as legal-rational constructions characteristic for the 19th century emerging within a particular political-administrative and legal framework and often characterized by idiosyncratic national features (Demmke 2004, 2005; Demmke and Moilanen, 2010; Page and Wright, 1999). In this perspective, CSS is conceptualized as a traditional career system, fitting a particular set of state traditions, and – irrespective of country – responding in a similar way to similar pressures irrespective of national contexts. This perspective, however, is seriously impaired and we must, instead, differentiate between CSS as a neo-institutional concept and CSS as an organization.

In the Bekke, Perry, and Toonen volume (1996) CSS were defined as institutions (i.e. rule complexes) that mobilize human resources in the service of the state. These rule complexes then become manifest in a particular organizational design. Hence, CSS is an institutional arrangement and not just an organizational structure or career system. As an institutional arrangement, that is, the deepest level of analysis, it includes constituting values such as Rechtsstaat principles. These values and principles are manifest in, inter alia, the design of specific decision-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 governance 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 principles 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.

3 Construction and the plan of book

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 governance 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 effects on the different civil service systems. Obviously, this includes attention to the historical perspective, since the impact of the past is as relevant as the influence of contemporary changes. Tony Verheijen and Aleksandra Rabrenovic discuss rapid changes and their effects in Central and Eastern European civil service systems (Chapter 2). They specifically consider the usefulness of the legalist continental European model, the performance-focused Anglo-American model, and the corporatist South Asian model, and then assess the feasibility of New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms in that part of Europe. They have paid specific attention to the impact of the fiscal crisis in Central and Eastern Europe. One of the features they observe is that the initial strengthening of civil service legislation leading up to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Civil Service Systems and the Challenges of the 21st Century
• 2  Civil Service Development in Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS: A Perfect Storm?
• 3  Civil Service Systems in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis
• 4  Anglophone Systems: Diffusion and Policy Transfer within an Administrative Tradition
• 5  Explaining Civil Service Reform in Asia
• 6  Africa: Revitalizing Civil Service Systems to Enhance Economic Performance
• 7  National Civil Service Systems in Western Europe: The End or Endurance of Weberian Bureaucracy?
• 8  Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains and Dynamics of Institutional Change
• 9  Public Service Systems at Subnational and Local Levels of Government: A BritishGermanFrench Comparison
• 10  Middle-Level Officials and Policy
• 11  Transitions in Civil Service Systems: Robustness and Flexibility in Human Resource Management
• 12  Civil Service Systems and Public Service Motivation
• 13  Law and Management: Comparatively Assessing the Reach of Judicialization
• 14  The Constitutional Responsibility of the Civil Service
• 15  Civil Service Systems and Responsibility, Accountability and Performance: A Multi-Dimensional Approach
• 16  Governance and Civil Service Systems: From Easy Answers to Hard Questions
• 17  Is Past Prologue to 21st-Century Civil Service Systems? Exploring Historical Frames for Discovering Lessons about Institutional Futures
• 18  Political-Administrative Relations: Evolving Models of Politicization
• 19  Political (System) Reform: Can Administrative Reform Succeed Without?
• 20  Civil Servants in the Enabling Framework State of the 21st Century
• Index