Development of public administration

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Ø 1) Read this text and do task 1 for text 5.3.

Ø 2) Answer the questions on the text:

a) What are the main principles of American civil service?

b) Do you agree with the quote by the US President Jackson?

c) What is the “spoils system” and what are its consequences?

d) In what way is civil service in the USA different from that of the UK?

From the early days of the federation two principles in civil service were important. First, there was antipathy to the notion “a cadre of permanent civil servants.” President Jackson clearly dismissed this notion of “a highly professional caste” when he said in 1829 that “the duties of all public officers are... so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance. As a consequence,” he said, “I cannot but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience. No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.”

The second principle was that public office should be elective. It followed more or less automatically. But because this principle could not be practically applied to the subordinate levels of administration, there developed the “spoils system.” In it, a public office became a perquisite of political victory, and was widely used to reward political support. This system was influenced by persistent, blatant, and ultimately unacceptable degrees of inefficiency, corruption, and partisanship. These particular faults were strongly felt after the Civil War (1861-1865), during the period of rapid economic and social development.

DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

IN THE EAST

Ø 1) Read this text and do task 1 for text 5.3.

China. The People’s Republic of China illustrates the conflict between revolutionary bureau­cracy and the need to construct strong administrative machinery in order to achieve revolutionary goals. China’s long tradition of bureaucracy remained important even after the Communist Party came to power in 1949.

Within a decade, the importance of the administration resulted in a gap between the elite and the masses. It also resulted in excessive stratification among the ruling bureaucrats, or cadres, themselves. There was a distinction between “old cadres” and “new cadres,” depending on the date of an official’s entry into the revolutionary movement. There was also a complex system of job evaluation that divided the civil service into 24 grades, each with its own rank, salary scales, and distinctions. Thus, there were very considerable differences of power, prestige, and prerogatives and psychological barriers between the highest and lowest grades, just like between the cadres and the masses. These distinctions and discrepancies were widely attacked during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, but they remained deeply ingrained in the administrative structure.

Japan. Until the 17^th century, Japan was administered by a military establishment made up of vassals and nobles.

After the 1630s a civil bureaucracy developed and had a more important role than the military. Appointment within the bureaucracy was based upon family rank, and officials were loyal primarily to the feudal lord.

The Japanese bureaucracy moved away from feudal rank as the basis of appointments and established in its place loyalty to the emperor only after Matthew C. Perry sailed four U.S. warships into Uraga Harbour in 1853. Thus more than two centuries of Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world was ended by force. After that, merit appointments were introduced in Japan. Yet, a modern civil service was created on the basis of job security, career paths, and entry by open competition only in the 1880s, during the Meiji Restoration. Tokyo University law graduates dominated this new civil service. Personal loyalty to the emperor was reflected in the status of Japanese civil servants as “Emperor’s Officials.”

After World War II, the Allied occupation authorities directed much of a Japanese law. The law stated that all public officials should be servants of the people rather than of the emperor. The National Public Service Law of 1947 set up an independent National Personnel Authority to administer recruitment, promotion, conditions of employment, standards of performance, and job classification for the new civil service. Technically, the emperor himself became a civil servant. Civil servants were classified into two groups – the regular service and a spe­cial service. Civil servants in the former category entered the service by competitive examination on a standard contract with tenure. The special service included elected officials and political appointees and covered such officials as members of the Diet (legislature), judges, members of the audit boards, and ambassadors.

Although in theory the sovereign people have an inalienable right to choose and dismiss all public officials – who are constitutionally described as “servants of the whole community” – both tradition and political practice have allowed the civil service in Japan to retain and consolidate its old position in government. The idealization of the scholar-bureaucrat (a Confucian tradition borrowed from China) makes the civil service an independent power centre. Political struggles in the Diet have led to constantly changing ministries, and individual ministers rarely stay at a post long enough to establish firm control of their administration. As in many democratic countries with volatile political systems, administrative control has tended to pass to senior civil servants.

Ø 2) What is common between the civil services in China and Japan? In what way is the Eastern civil service different from the Western one?

Ø 3) Choose the words from the text for your dictionary of professional terms.

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