Asia's Influence on Public Administration in the West

Abstract

Those who hold top career administrative posts in most governments throughout the world are selected through highly competitive examinations. They form a prestigious cadre to which a nation's highest achievers aspire. Indeed, at the core of most developed, and many developing, political systems, is a bureaucracy headed by a “higher civil service, ”which we define as an elite corps of career public officials who fill key positions in governmental administration. Even militarily dominated polities often depend on a higher civil service at the apex of their administrative structures. Most of the highest civil servants are generalists, but technological developments have speeded their decline and the rise of specialists among them. In the United States, even a nominal higher civil service was not authorized until the Senior Executive Service was created by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, long after most countries formed such a system. In this paper, we trace the historical evolution elsewhere of higher civil service systems both to determine their influence on the United States and to understand better the peculiarities of the U.S. system.