Political Interference in the Philippine Civil Service

Abstract

When set against a more international and generic literature, the relative thinness of the debate on the Philippine civil service, and its comparatively limited engagement with that literature, is very marked, as is the need for more critical attention to be directed at the problems facing the service. In particular, the certainty and ease with which the service is presented as a mere appendage of a distorted polity, and its informal qualities are viewed rather negatively, seem to deserve closer scrutiny. But the relative paucity of substantial empirical material renders the development and application of models, and any reinterpretations which they might yield, problematic and less open to contradiction. Therefore, in this paper I focus on the accounts of civil servants and politicians as a means of enriching the empirical base. In doing so I draw out the dimensionality of political interference in the Philippine civil service; I challenge perspectives on bureaucracy to accommodate these dimensions within more unified theory; and I point the way to an approach which might be capable of accommodating those dimensions.