Career bureaucracy and technocracy in the Philippines: from authoritarian construction to democratic deconstruction

Abstract

Set in the wider historical context of a country in severe political crisis at the beginning of the 1970s, the Career Executive Service (CES)—the managerial class in the Philippine civil service—began as an authoritarian construction within the political and institutional structure of the martial law regime. Because Philippine post-war state-building was accompanied by a weak central civil service, the CES became indispensable in promoting an entrepreneurial administrative culture which emphasized quality of innovativeness or risk-taking and senior-level teamwork within a bureaucracy that was professionally subservient to a technocratic elite, apart from providing the regime with a progressive civilian image. Insulated from power politics, the CES nevertheless became a closed merit-based system co-existing with a clientelist structure inhabited by rent-seeking coalitions outside it. Under the restored nominal democratic system in 1986, the CES underwent deconstruction, but still preserved the boundary bet...