The Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative Perspective

A Quest for Control

B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135996253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book addresses an important issue and debate in public administration: the politicization of civil service systems and personnel. Using a comparative framework the authors address issues such as compensation, appointments made from outside the civil service system, anonymity, partisanship and systems used to handle appointees of prior administrations in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Britain, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Greece.

1 Politicization of the civil service
Concepts, causes, consequences

B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre

One of the persistent claims made about the public sector over the past several decades has been that the public service has become more politicized. The exact meaning of that term is often not specified, but the general sense is that members of the public service must now pay greater attention to politics than they did in the past. In addition, it appears that politicians in elective offices are investing greater time and energy in ensuring that the members of the public service are compatible with their own partisan and policy preferences. Even in countries such as the United States that have for some time permitted a good deal of latitude for political appointment to administrative positions there is a sense that these political control structures over the bureaucracy continue to “thicken” (Light, 1996). These changes reflect a retreat from the institutionalized merit system that has (or had) been the standard way of organizing employment in the public sector, in the United States (Ingraham, 1995) and elsewhere.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss alternative conceptions and measurements of politicization, as well as some of its causes and consequences. There appears to be a sense among practitioners as well as academic analysts that some politicization has been occurring, but the evidence supporting that belief is often subjective, anecdotal, and rather diffuse. This chapter therefore will be not so much a firm mapping of the terrain as a set of road signs along the way toward a better understanding of the concept. It will therefore admit several conceptions of politicization, and indeed will welcome various lenses through which we can approach that concept.

Definitions of politicization

Before we begin to try to measure the phenomenon of politicization of the public service we should first attempt to define it. Politicization has appeared in a number of recent discussions of the public service (Meyers, 1985; Rouban, 1998; 1999; Clifford and Wright, 1997; Derlien, 1996), but often has been discussed using rather different interpretations and definitions. At the most basic level, by politicization of the civil service we mean the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria in the selection, retention, promotion, rewards, and disciplining of members of the public service. Unlike the use of patronage appointments in many less developed countries (World Bank, 2001), politicization in the industrialized democracies implies attempts to control policy and implementation, rather than just supply jobs to party members or members of a family or clique.¹

The public service is inherently a political creation, and also inherently involved in politics, simply because it is the structure that delivers services publiques to the citizens – it plays a role in determining who gets what from the public sector. That said, however, the pattern of political development has been to shield the civil service from overt political control in order to enhance its efficiency and to ensure its fairness in dealing with citizens (Torstendahl, 1991). While any institution so inherently concerned with issues of governing can never be made fully apolitical, it has been removed from the more direct forms of partisan control.

The definition of politicization advanced above is broad, and requires some ramifications. The first point is that almost all civil service systems have some level of political involvement in personnel matters that is considered appropriate.² There are a large number of appointed officials in the American bureaucracy that are manifestly political and those appointments have been available to presidents and cabinet secretaries for decades. Likewise the “political civil servants” in Germany have a known party affiliation but the administrative system provides means of permitting that political involvement, while at the same time maintaining the merit basis of their initial appointment (Derlien, 1996). The more recent concern about politicization, therefore, implies a sense that those bounds of acceptability are being breached.

A second point to consider is that the nature of the political criteria being employed when the public service is being politicized may vary. We usually think of these as being partisan political loyalties, but attempts at politicization may also reflect policy and even stylistic issues, as they are manifested in the activities of public servants. For example, during the Thatcher years in the United Kingdom it was often argued that politicization was occurring less on the basis of allegiance to the Conservative Party and more on the basis of being “one of us,” i.e. being committed to a program of radical reform of the public sector (Clifford and Wright, 1998). The support for reform may have been correlated with Conservative Party membership, but commitment was more important by far than partisanship. The longer a party remains in power, the more this form of politicization appears to manifest itself, as it did with the Social Democratic Party in Sweden (Rothstein, 1986). In the extreme case civil servants may be selected and deselected on the basis of their personal, almost clientelistic, loyalties to ministers and other political leaders as well as partisan allegiance.

A third point is that the manner in which the political criteria are employed may matter for the performance of the administrative system. For example, permitting merit criteria to dominate the selection and promotion of public servants for most of their careers, with the political criteria being used primarily to remove very senior officials and to replace them (particularly after a change of government), is less destructive of the principles underlying merit systems than is more overt selection of civil servants throughout their careers. Likewise, the focus on policy goals as opposed to partisan allegiance mentioned above may be less destructive to democratic values than would be strict partisanship in selection.

Fourth, politicization may also mean that public servants begin to take on tasks that formerly (and formally) might have been considered to be political. There is some evidence that ministers find it increasingly difficult to separate their political roles from their governmental roles, and require civil servants to perform tasks that might be better performed by political aides, or by political party personnel (Savoie, 1999). There is some truth in the argument that the political and the governmental are difficult to separate in the life of a minister. That having been said, he or she conventionally has been considered to have an obligation to err on the side of not using public employees for political purposes, and to maintain the probity of public office. As we will point out below, however, parliaments and other public institutions may be forcing these political roles onto public servants, and civil servants themselves find it difficult to refuse functions assigned to them.

Fifth, increased politicization in the partisan sense may imply depoliticization in other senses. One target of would-be politicizers in many countries has been the close connection of social and economic interest groups with ministries, and with individual civil servants. For that functional, corporatist relationship, concerned politicians would substitute a partisan or political loyalty. The commitment of bureaucrats to the values and interests of the policy area is generally seen as just another reason for the difficulties that ministers encounter when attempting to manage their programs and their departments. This is especially true for parties that come to office after some period in opposition and find that there are working relationships in place that they do not favor. Still, substituting the influence of political parties and politicians means that other political actors, the interest groups, will be less influential.

A final consideration arising from this definition of politicization is that in some ways political criteria may be more important for ensuring democratic values in governing than are conventional merit values. One standard critique (see Rose, 1976) of conventional bureaucracies is that the permanent, career public service is not sufficiently responsive to changes in the priorities of their political leadership.³ They are argued (somewhat stereotypically) to persist in their own conceptions of appropriate policies, regardless of what their ministers want. Replacing those permanent employees with more responsive, if politicized, public employees may actually improve the correspondence between electoral results and policies (see Peters, 2000). Despite that possibility, the term politicization has a generally negative connotation in democratic societies.

Following from this last point, we must ask whether the classic notion of “neutral competence” (Kaufman, 1956) is really the most important dimension of competence for the public service. That is, should governments really be content with civil servants who have few commitments to policy, or even to the government? This is a more normative than empirical point about governing, but it does raise interesting questions about the importance of political appointment of public servants. The “responsive competence” of public servants is especially important for political systems attempting to implement basic changes within the administrative system. Thus, the models of civil service neutrality exported from the Western democracies may not be as suitable for the countries of central and eastern Europe that are attempting to overcome decades of economic stagnation and deterioration of public services.

Targets of politicization

The above definition implies that there is no single way of achieving politicization, and that there are numerous targets that might be addressed. For example, politicization is usually discussed in terms of the employees of the public sector. The assumption is that the best way to gain control over the public bureaucracy is to have the capability of appointing one’s own faithful to positions that influence or control public policy. There are, of course, numerous examples of those appointees “marrying the natives” and becoming simply new components of the machinery they were meant to direct, but politicians generally persist in the view that appointing personnel into the bureaucracy is a crucial mechanism of control. Public organizations are very good at capturing any new members of their nominal leadership, given that the careerists tend to control information and to control contacts with interest groups in society.

Actual appointment of partisan loyalists to those positions in the bureaucracy may not be so crucial if the political leaders are able to influence the behavior of the personnel already in those positions. Indeed, this is a much less expensive strategy, in terms of the political capital required, and in terms of the wastage of personnel resources in government.⁴ If the same goals can be achieved by winning over the career bureaucracy, then everyone may be better off. This desired effect on the behavior of public servants may be achieved in several ways. One strategy is to use ideology and leadership to mobilize the public service – this can be seen in Tony Blair’s success with the British civil service, as well as in many mobilization regimes in the Third World. Fear (of loss of employment, demotion, transfer, etc.) is, of course, another and much less positive means of achieving those same behavioral ends.

Following closely from the strategy of changing behavior is a political strategy of attempting to change the attitudes and culture of the public service. As intimated above, this strategy has some positive democratic connotations if the purpose of the proposed change is to have the bureaucracy follow the election results, and to consider that their task is to be more than grudging executors of government policy. That said, however, changing the component of civil service culture that supports detachment from the politics of the day in favor of a more responsive and political conception of the role may not have entirely positive consequences for government, or for the public service.⁵

Some aspects of the “New Public Management” (NPM) have been directed at changing the culture of the public service into a more business-like set of beliefs and values, but it is not clear that these changes would in fact make the bureaucracy more responsive to politicians. The actual effect of these changes may be to make civil servants responsive to a different set of internal motivations and values, but still largely self-directed rather than responding to their political masters as the motivation for greater politicization would suggest. Indeed, some of the mantras of the NPM, such as “let the managers manage,” may provide civil servants with a justification for disregarding the requests of their nominal superiors.

As well as addressing the people within government – themselves as employees, their values and their behaviors – politicization can also manifest itself in structural terms. In this instance the strategy is that if the public service cannot be made to respond to political pressures, and its staff cannot be replaced, then there must be some way of working around them to achieve the goals that the politicians were elected to implement. The structural solutions tend to involve duplicating or supplementing the career service with a cadre of more political officials. For example, in a number of cases politically responsive “chiefs of staff” have been appointed to supplement the work of the career head of the civil service within a department, e.g. the Deputy Minister in Canada (Savoie, 1994). The recent controversy over the role of politically appointed “spin doctors” in British ministries represents another example of duplicating career officials with politicized appointments (Webster and Webster, 2002). In other cases there have been attempts to create analogues of the cabinet systems found in France and Belgium.

Somewhat related to the structural solution is the idea of politicians attempting to change the arenas in which decisions are made as a means of achieving goals. This strategy is especially effective in federal or quasi-federal regimes in which the different levels of government have a good deal of autonomy. So, for example, conservatives in the United States often attempt to move decisions down to state and local levels in order to produce solutions that are less likely to involve substantial levels of government expenditure, and that are also likely to be more conservative ideologically.⁶ Or the political leader may simply attempt to find a government that is controlled by members of his or her party. Within the European Union moving decisions to Brussels may involve different sets of bureaucrats and political interests, and perhaps having policy proposals receive a more favorable reading.

A particular example of changing venues for decision-making is moving decisions out to quasi-public organizations, such as the famous “quangos” in the United Kingdom and analogous bodies elsewhere. A priori, there may be no particular reason to expect these organizations to be any different politically from the central government. What may make quangos a particularly attractive strategy is the capacity of a sitting government to control appointments to the boards running them. In the United Kingdom, for example, it is estimated that there are now over 70,000 political appointments in quangos and other non-departmental public bodies that are available to politicians who seek to control public policy (Skelcher, 1998). There has been a similar growth in these quasi-public organizations in other democracies (Greve, 1999).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, politicians ...