The Civil Service

Keith Dowding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134903801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Radical reforms of the civil service during the 1980s and 90s have broken up the old unified hierarchical structures. In their place are peripheral agencies concerned with policy implementation and a central core comcerned with policy-making. The radical reforms are described and assessed in terms of the public choice and public management theories which underpin them. Bureau-maximizing and bureau-shaping models are used to predict the directions we should expect the reforms to take and their likely success. The key central chapter of the book examines the equivocal use of the term "efficiency" used to justify the managerial changes. This is the first textbook which critically examines theories of bureaucracy together with an introductory and descriptive account of the civil service today.

1
Introduction
The civil service and the state

It is impossible not to wonder at the inability of administrators and politicians in Britain not to recognize that to speak critically of their experience inevitably involves a species of theorizing: their ritual rejection of theory merely tends to ensure that such theorizing as they do indulge in is badly done.

(Johnson 1978:271)

There are many books on the civil service and on bureaucratic theory. There are not many which combine explanations of both bureaucratic theory and the civil service. There are a few books which empirically test theories of the bureaucracy by setting them against the evidence of the British civil service. Books of the latter kind, like those concerned with bureaucratic theory itself are often rather dry and hard to understand, which is fair enough. The world is hard to understand; and if it is made to appear simpler than it really is, we will be hiding as much of the world as we reveal. However, most of the books which provide easy introductions for the undergraduate or general reader merely describe the civil service and do not consider, other than in passing, the theories of bureaucracy which help us to explain the way the civil service works. They are too full of descriptions, opinions, anecdotes and personalities with not enough theoretical analysis explaining how these elements all fit together. Often the reason for this is that writers of the descriptive mode believe that the general theories of bureaucratic behaviour are badly drawn or inapplicable. They may be right in this belief. But if the existing theories are poor, then some better ones should be divised, rather than denying that theories can be used at all. As Nevil Johnson implies in the quotation above, to deny theory is merely to obscure the theory with which one is operating.

THE CIVIL SERVICE

This book is about the civil service in Britain, which is at the centre of British political life. Whilst the newspapers and television concentrate upon politicians and what goes on in the Cabinet and Westminster, many of the day-to-day decisions with which government is concerned are taken by civil servants. It is at the centre of a policy network comprising organized pressure groups, politicians, parties and government ministers. What do civil servants bring to this network? Do they dominate it, as Sir Humphrey Appleby used to dominate Jim Hacker in the TV series Yes, Minister? Or have politicians fought back and taken over policy, as Jim Hacker began to do in the later series of Yes, Prime Minister? For many commentators this did seem to be the case as Margaret Thatcher, the most dominant Prime Minister in living memory, carried out the most radical set of policies and reforms during her second and third terms of office. Indeed it was under her stewardship that the most recent and probably the most far-reaching civil service reforms began.

Twenty years ago writing a book on the civil service was a comparatively easy task. The service had remained largely unchanged for almost a century, acquiring new tasks and departments, a rearrangement here and there; but in the main historians of the civil service could stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. Originality in analysing the civil service a generation ago came through applying a different theory to explain the largely immobile object. All that has changed. During the late 1980s and early 1990s the civil service was rapidly and radically transformed. Its edifice has been altered from a straightforward hierarchical line structure to a complex form with a core of policy-making civil servants in Whitehall surrounded by a periphery of policy-executing agencies. Even at the time of writing the status of these agencies is under review, and some are likely to move from the public to the private sector. Even the role of the core Whitehall policy-maker is in question with some suggesting that private and politicized policy advice may be advantageous to the current career structure. Today, writing a book about the civil service is to describe a moving target; explaining how it works and why it is changing is even harder. This is the task of this book.

The evolutionary process which saw only minor changes has given way to a revolutionary process of change. At a seminar at the London School of Economics in 1993, a senior civil servant described these changes as ‘permanent revolution’. The question that begs to be asked is: why is the bedrock of the British state now undergoing Maoist convolutions under a Conservative government? The answer is to be found in the character of the Conservative administration which gained power in 1979. Margaret Thatcher’s government was no ordinary traditional Conservative regime committed to conserving the fundamentals of the state and unlikely to initiate changes to the constitution. Rather it was led by a Prime Minister who believed in the ‘free market’ libertarian doctrines of the ‘New Right’ (Bosanquet 1983). These New Right principles in the guise of public-choice arguments (King 1987) entailed a critique of the ever expanding state and a set of prescriptions for ending the malaise of Britain’s decline. The public-choice critique of the state forms the theoretical centrepiece of this book. It is used to examine the civil service as it was, and to explain why such radical reform was thought to be necessary. It is then used to explore those changes and to question whether they will have the effects expected of them by their proponents.

MODELS OF THE STATE

There are numerous competing models of the state (Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987) and the public-choice account is not the only one that will be examined here. Three others will also be considered: the constitutional-representative government view; the pluralist account; the autonomy of the democratic state. Each implies certain ways in which the central pillar of the state—the civil service—should operate. For those upholding the constitutional-representative government vision of the British state, the civil service is a neutral machine wound up and kept ticking by an elected government itself supported by parliament representing the people. We see this idea in the justification of old-style hierarchical forms of bureaucratic organization usually defended by a Weberian model of the bureaucracy. We encounter this in Chapter 2 where we examine Weberian justifications of hierarchy (and find Weber has a more realistic account of the state than some of his advocates), and again in Chapter 8 where we probe the relationship between civil servants, ministers and parliament in terms of the constitutional model. This model of the state is recognized as ‘fictional’ even by its adherents. They realize that the relationships are more complex than the model describes, but believe that it is a useful guide to how things ought to be, and that it can help explain why some of the actors behave as they do. But we shall see that its ‘fictional form’ makes it virtually useless both as a prescriptive guide and as an aid to explanation.

The pluralist view of the state, despite decades of criticism, is still the dominant paradigm of political science. The target of much of that criticism is an idealized version which has much in common with the constitutional-representative government model. Like the latter, the idealized pluralist account of the state sees the civil service and other policy-making agencies of the state as a neutral arena where the interplay of political forces determines policy. The main difference between this and the constitutional view is that the role of interest group organizations is recognized as a far more important system of representation than parliament. This idealized pluralism sees government as just another force alongside competing group interests. This version exists only in the eyes of critics of pluralism (Dowding 1991); all modern pluralists have a more sophisticated account of the state. The role of interest group organizations is still seen as vital, but the central organizations of the state are also defined as interests in their own right. It is recognized that policy-making is segmented into different policy networks, sometimes crossing departmental boundaries, sometimes contained in small policy communities at the departmental or sub-departmental level (Jordan and Richardson 1987; Marsh and Rhodes 1992). These different policy networks are defined by the characteristics of their members and the nature of the relations between groups (Dowding 1994c, 1995).

Pluralism shades into the third model of the state: the autonomy of the democratic state. Like pluralists, state autonomists see policymaking as segmented into different policy networks, but they downplay the power and importance of different organized interests. According to state autonomists (Nordlinger 1981), group organizations only influence policy where government does not already have strong policy preferences. Group organizations may affect policy in open-issue areas, but where departments already have set out the parameters of their preferred policies only those groups which conform to these parameters are allowed into policy-influencing positions. In Chapter 6, which concentrates upon the policy-making role rather than the organizational structure of the civil service, we examine both the pluralist and the state-autonomist models of policy making.

The New Right model of the state differs from the others in that it is more openly normative, not only explaining how the state operates but also prescribing how it can be made more efficient. The book is necessarily dominated by this model, which provides the intellectual justification for the process of organizational reform the civil service is currently undergoing. The New Right model suggests that there is an internal dynamic which leads to state inefficiency and inexorable growth in the state machine. Where pluralist and constitutional-representative models see the interplay of political forces and interests as an essential, though not always desirable, feature of democracy, the New Right sees this process as an unmitigated evil. What traditional constitutionalists call ‘politics’ and pluralists call ‘group representation’, the New Right calls ‘rent-seeking’. Rent-seeking for the New Right is a process whereby some groups extract an economic rent, in the form of state subsidies, simply for being there. So farm subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy are a form of economic rent for farmers, subsidized road-building programmes a form of economic rent for car drivers, and social security payments a form of economic rent for the poor. These demands for rent from all sections of society allow civil servants to promote certain programmes for their own departments. The overall tax burden goes up, ensuring a less efficient economy all round. Civil servants are also enabled to maximize the budgets of their own departments in their own self-interest, seen in terms of material welfare and influence over the direction of the state. This model of bureaucratic behaviour, together with more anecdotal critiques of civil service inefficiency within the traditional hierarchic structure, led to the current reforms of the civil service.

Chapters 2–5 are about the organization of the civil service; chapters 3– 5 critically examine the New Right public-choice theory and civilservice reform. These chapters suggest the sort of success and failures we may expect to see following those reforms. Chapter 2 examines the justification of the hierarchical form of public-sector organization within the traditional representative government view. Using Weber’s ideas as the traditional justification for such hierarchy, we see why it is supposed to be rational and efficient. Weber provides a good counterpoint to the New Right critique. We see in Chapter 3, the chapter with the most complex material, that the term ‘efficiency’ is used ambiguously as in much economic and public-administration writing. Weber’s use of the term can be compared to that of modern economists. Furthermore, the notions of ‘rationality’ that Weber and the public-choice school utilize are not completely convergent. That too is worth examination. Despite its difficulty Chapter 3 is important in order to understand fully the New Right critique and thus the fundamentals of the reform process.

Chapters 6–8 are about policy-making. Chapter 6 examines the evidence of the relative powers of ministers, pressure group organizations and senior civil servants in the generation and implementation of policy. Here the pluralist and state-autonomy accounts are most fruitfully compared. Whilst the public perception is that the radical Conservative administrations since 1979 have been less influenced by outside pressures and that the civil service is more controlled by ministers, we see that the picture is more complicated. Chapter 7 is a closer look at the difference the European Union makes to both organization and policy-making in the civil service. Most books on the civil service pay only passing attention to the effects of Europe on the central element of the British state. Here I have tried to fill these lacunae, though Europe is developing so quickly that the descriptions in Chapter 7 may soon be out of date. Chapter 8 returns to the constitutional-representative government model with which we started. Essentially concerned with the accountability of the civil service, it examines the relationship between civil servants, ministers and parliament to see how strong and useful the thread of accountability really is. This chapter suggests that accountability has never operated as it is often claimed by constitutional writers, but in this chapter it is also argued that the agency reform process will have less impact than is often asserted.

2
Hierarchy
Weber and the old model

This chapter is concerned with the first model of the state mentioned in Chapter 1: the constitutional-representative government model. There it was described as a ‘fiction’, because it was not developed in order to explain the reality of the British system of government or its civil service but rather as a guide to such explanations and as a normative model of how well-functioning bureaucracies should behave. The Weberian model, with which this chapter begins, underlies the standard defence of the hierarchical and politically neutral form of the civil service as it has typically operated. This chapter describes the traditional organization of the civil service before the reforms of the 1980s and demonstrate how that fits in with conventional thinking on the operation of key issues in constitutional theory. This chapter provides a benchmark for later discussions of these issues, particularly in the light of academic concern that the recent radical reformations of the civil service create substantial problems for British constitutional practice. The chapter concludes with a critique of hierarchy which underpins the recent reforms.

WEBER AND BUREAUCRACY

Max Weber was a German sociologist writing in the early decades of this century. He has been very influential in the English-speaking world as well as in continental Europe. He is well known for his ‘ideal-typical’ account of bureaucracy, less well known for his criticisms of the way in which bureaucracies take on a political life of their own, reflecting the social-class interests of their members.

To understand Weber’s project in creating an ‘ideal-typical’ model of bureaucracy, we need to appreciate the logic of the ‘ideal-typical’ approach, current thinking on bureaucracy when he was writing (and how bureaucracies were run at that time), as well as his overall aims. We also need to describe Weber’s rationalization method of social research, for it is a key to understanding his ideal-typical approach to bureaucracy and the underlying justification for the hierarchical form of the civil service.

The ideal type

Ideal types are abstract constructions that enable us to try to understand the social world. Weber suggests that it is impossible to understand any given phenomenon in its totality, rather we can only ever gain a partial insight. We need to identify certain key features from the totality of any given social object, such as a bureaucracy. The features that are important are those which contribute to explaining why bureaucracy works in the way it does and which distinguish it from other social organizations such as the firm. Thus in ideal-typical explanations we abstract the important and crucial aspects whilst suppressing others. In this manner we create an ideal type.

Weber does not think this process denotes the objective ‘essence’ of bureaucracy nor that we have produced a ‘correct’ description of its essential features. Rather the ideal type is a construct by which the particular questions being addressed may be answered. Which features are accentuated and which minimized varies depending upon the problem the investigator is considering and the questions asked. For example, if we ask why a one-inch square peg will not go into a one-inch round hole we could give either a geometric or an atomic answer. Which we choose to give depends upon the context in which the question is asked (Putnam 1978:42) Similarly, if we ask a question about the power relationship between senior civil servants and politicians, whether we give a legalistic or a behavioural answer may depend upon the context in which the question is asked.

According to Weber, the ideal type thus constructed can then be used as a point of comparison with examples of bureaucracies around the world. Differences between actual examples and the ideal type can therefore become the focus of investigation. If a given bureaucracy does not work in ideal-typical fashion, we can examine why and explain the differences in the operation of actual bureaux as opposed to what is expected by the ideal type.

The ideal type is a general description which maps out the form of some social scientific concept. It gives the cr...