The Paradox of Managerialism

Abstract

Unlike the traditional language of public administration, which emphasizes stability, rules, and responsiveness to the law, the new public management vocabulary accentuates change, decentralization, responsiveness to consumers, performance, and the need to earn rather than to spend. Borrowing from the world of private-sector management, the vocabulary of the new public management has so far shown a remarkable degree of consensus among the political leadership and opinion makers of various countries about the desired nature of change. Change is to be primarily organizational: its goal is to strengthen management capacity in government operations. New public management thus conjures up images of debureaucratization (Savoie, 1994, 187) and depoliticization. As Osborne and Gaebler (1992, 267) note, book is about governance, not politics. This article seeks to undermine the latter image by focussing on the implications of political executives' losing control over the implementation of their policy following managerial reforms put in place under NPM. Such loss, in turn, makes them hunger for more control over the bureaucracy. The striking outcome of this process is that the senior servants who are removed from policy making and thus supposed to be less political (i.e., less in the line of fire and more secure as a result), find their positions becoming more insecure due to the political executives' desire for more control. This outcome is best formulated as a paradox: Investing in the public administration's managerial capital (i.e., giving public managers more authority to manage programs) is most likely to result in political executives' disinventing in the public administration's political capital (i. e., giving ministers greater capacity for setting central directions and priorities and intervention in personnel matters) so as to resolve the problems of loss of control over policy implementation raised by the managerial rearms put in place under the new public management. The contradiction between reduced policy making of senior servants and enhanced policy control over them raises two hypotheses. First, the more authority and discretion public managers are given to manage programs, the less secure political executives want them to be. Second, making senior civil servants less secure is most likely to have the following systemic influence on the public administration. As ministers obtain a greater capacity for setting central directions and priorities, senior bureaucrats lose policy autonomy but gain a greater managerial element in their role. When an alternative (policy) advisory structure is set up, the role of senior officials contracts. These hypotheses are strongly supported by a comparative analysis of changes in senior officials' tenure security and protection from external competition in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, Austria, and Malta between 1980 and 1996. These countries present a range of governmental structures, cultural attributes, and management traditions. New Zealand, Malta, and the United Kingdom represent unitary states whereas Australia, Canada, and Austria feature a federal structure. The United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are located within the Anglo tradition; public service in these countries operates on the principle of anonymity, secrecy, and political neutrality. Their very institutional structures work on the principle of elected political executives who are advised by the permanent civil servants and are responsible for policy implementation. Political executives maintain the professional and apolitical character of the civil service by avoiding actions that might fundamentally alter the relationship between political executives and bureaucrats. In the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, for example, ministers are limited in their choice of eligible civil servants. In Canada, however, the staff of ministers offices, like deputy ministers, senior public servants working at the head of public or quasi-public corporations, or the staff working in so-called administrative courts, are not governed by the principle of merit. …