what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Sunday, October 3, 2021

Yes, Minister

Not so long ago, I spent almost a decade of my life on “civil service reform” in countries ruled until 1989 by communist parties which brooked no dissent. It wasn’t exactly the easiest of tasks to convince the new breed of politicians that they needed a civil service system which was less subservient – particularly because the model most of us westerners brought was one where politicians took the decisions - for civil servants to implement.

In reality, of course, the dynamic was somewhat different – with the role of senior civil servants being to bring the more expert institutional wisdom to challenge the generally naïve and over-simplistic ideas of politicians new to office. But, in Britain, Margaret Thatcher started a politicisation continued by New Labour which has become ever more intense. "Are you one of us?" became Thatcher's catchphrase - and Bliar just assumed that, after 18 years of Tory rule, senior civil servants were untrustworthy.....

I know that many readers’ eyes will have glazed over from the very first mention of the phrase “civil service” but bear with me as I quickly cover the background to what is a crucial subject to our days – how to get policies that work 

Cronyism was endemic in government until the late 19th century - it was indeed the infamous charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 during the Crimean War which created the conditions which led to the creation of the British civil service system which remained intact for more than 100 years.  

A Royal Commission on the Civil Service (Northcote-Trevelyan) had been set up in the early 1850s but had been labouring until that military action exposed the disastrous nature of the aristocratic leadership in the country – it was the spark which led to the demands for a more meritocratic approach…..

And the early 1960s saw strong questioning again of British administrative traditions – epitomized in the establishment in 1966 of the Royal (or Fulton) Commission on the Civil Service which laid the foundations to a much more managerial approach in the 1970s which became increasingly aggressive in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. Richard Chapman’s The Civil Service Commission – a bureau biography 1855-1991 (2005) is the best guide to this process – although B Guy Peters’ The Politics of Bureaucracy – an introduction to comparative public administration; (1978) was the first comparative and sociological approach to the subject. 

Guy Peters returned to the issue very recently in a short article which explored the effects of the populist mood on the relationship between politicians and civil servants 

the traditional conception of a stark separation of the competencies and the careers of civil servants and politicians was becoming more a useful myth for both parties, the spread of populism and other forms of “democratic backsliding” have altered these relationships.

In the contemporary populist era of governance there tends to be a stark separation between political leaders and their civil servants. The assumption by many, if not most of those political leaders, is that the bureaucrats are members of the “Deep State” that seeks to maintain its own power in the face of the will of “the people”.

While even when there were conflicts between politicians and bureaucrats in previous decades, they were still “different players on the same team”. However, today politicians and bureaucrats are often on different teams with different goals.

The political leaders in some countries, including some in the Visegrád Four countries, have sidelined their civil servants in favor of political appointees and cronies. The same has been true in the United States, Brazil and to a lesser extent in some West European countries. The civil servants may remain in place but are largely ignored by the political leaders. 

But there is an even more insidious force at work 

Prime ministers have tended to draw control over government to themselves, even from their ministerial colleagues, demanding greater loyalty from public servants in the process. The same process has affected the individual ministers who also want control over their civil servants, as opposed to “frank and fearless advice”. 

So much for the recent efforts of people like Matt Syed (“Rebel Ideas”) and Gillian Tett (“The Silo Effect”) to challenge the “groupthink” at the heart of government” 

Both the growing power of populist movements and the general increase of political polarization within government and society have been contributing to an increased level of politicization of civil servants and an increased use of patronage.

The concept of a neutral, expert civil service is now less acceptable to political leaders, and a variety of methods are being used to reduce the autonomy and independence of the civil service to ensure the loyalty of civil servants, even in countries with long histories of civil-service independence. 

The emphasis on political loyalty and adherence to the policy ideas of the government of the day is especially interesting in an era of (presumably) “evidence-based policymaking” (Cairney 2016).

The increased availability of evidence about policy both within individual countries and across countries should make the contemporary period one of applying expertise to solve policy problems.

But expertise has become politicized, and only those experts who support the policy ideas of the incumbent government are likely to have any influence. 

And then one for Emanuel Macron – 

While individual countries and the world are confronted with a host of wicked problems – notably climate change – the responses from governments may be very tame. Due to the relative lack of preparation for governing of populist governments, and their unwillingness to use the expertise available within the civil service, developing forceful and creative solutions will be difficult. This is all the more so given that any real solutions to problems such as climate change will involve upsetting existing patterns of life for “the people” who are the presumed beneficiaries of populist governments.

In Macron’s case, of course, the system still had the expertise which he tried to follow – but was outboxed by the gilets jaunes.

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