Permanent Bureaucracy Research Articles

Forest policies, administration, and management of the Leiria pinewood in Portugal (13th-18th centuries)

ABSTRACT The pinewood of Leiria is the most renowned Portuguese woodland. This article aims to shed light on the forest policies, administration, and governance of the pinewood from its blurry origins in the late 1200s to the late 1700s. By the early 15th century the state (Monarchy) had established a permanent bureaucracy for its management, with the main purpose of ensuring the availability of timber for shipbuilding. Throughout the Early Modern Age, the Portuguese Monarchy carefully managed the pinewood, paving the way for 19th-century scientific forestry. The fire of 1613 marked a turning point in the management of the pinewood, further linking the fate of the pinewood to the royal navy. The pinewood of Leiria is an ecosystem that has resulted from centuries of sound management by the Portuguese state. To unravel its history, this article combines the methods and materials of history, geography, and historical cartography.

Public personnel administration and human resource management paradigm on public service performance: Nigerian pendulum

Public personnel administration draws heavily from private personnel administration and using such knowledge for successful management within the permanent bureaucracy. Professional management of people in government is fundamental towards public service performance and the public good. From the nineteenth century and now public sector human resource management continuous to move away from the traditional personnel management approach and heading towards the new public management paradigm for improving public service performance. With 219 participants and by the exploratory research design, the result of the study indicates strong positive correlation between public personnel administration and public service performance. The study suggests that further study could examine the relationship between law making and its interpretation on public sector human resource management. It recommends that public personnel administration should learn more from the new public management approach to enhance effectiveness.

Externalization and politicization in policy advisory systems: a case study of contestable policy-making 2010–2015

ABSTRACTThis paper contends that since 2010 in the UK, there has been an unprecedented attempt to disrupt the traditional civil service ‘monopoly’ over policy advice, outsourcing policy-making to actors beyond the central state. The author argues that the policy-making processes of Whitehall and Westminster governance are being radically overhauled. In many Anglophone countries, ministers have sought to reduce their structural dependence on the permanent civil service. In so doing, ministers sought to gain political control over the machinery of policy-making. These efforts to restructure the permanent bureaucracy have had unintended consequences, however. The policy process in the UK state has become more fragmented, as policy-making and implementation have increasingly diverged.

What does the minister do? On the working conditions of political leaders

This article contributes insight into the working conditions of political leaders based on rarely accessible high‐quality data that include unique surveys of Danish ministers, mayors, and permanent secretaries supplemented by in‐depth interviews. The results show that the classical metaphor of the leader as a puppet master being pulled by an endless number of strings also fits the ministers. Their work life is fragmented in time and space, and their time is in great demand when compared to mayors and permanent secretaries. They experience high work pressure, which comes at a cost to their personal lives. They are exposed in public life and harassed, especially on social media. The implications for the balance between the minister and permanent bureaucracy, descriptive representation as well as policy innovation and quality of decision‐making are discussed. It is concluded that stressful working conditions are likely to affect the way our democracies work.

The Westminster system under the Cameron coalition: ‘Promiscuous partisanship’ or institutional resilience?

This article applies Aucoin's paradigm of New Political Governance derived from the comparative literature on Westminster systems to review changes in the UK machinery of government during the Coalition era from 2010 to 2015. The paper examines whether coalition government imposed ‘checks and balances’ that prevented Conservative ministers from enacting a further wave of New Public Management-style reforms of the permanent bureaucracy comparable to New Political Governance. The central argument of the article is that the institutional resilience of Westminster systems, particularly their capacity to safeguard norms of public service impartiality and non-partisanship in the face of the politicisation and externalisation of the policy-making process, has been underestimated. Nevertheless, Aucoin's concerns about the erosion of non-partisan affiliation in the civil service of the Anglophone countries remain apposite.

A lesson lived is a lesson learned: a critical re-examination of the origins of preventative counter-espionage in Britain

ABSTRACTWith the prevalence of official and authorised histories, official secrets and selective releases into Britain’s national archives, Intelligence History is in danger of moving from the ‘missing dimension’ to the ‘curated dimension’. This article seeks to show that it is necessary, and possible, to provide critical reinterpretations of important chapters within the historiography of British Intelligence History. In this article, I attempt to weave the founding of MI5’s preventative branch into the wider history of pre-war British politics and the creation of a permanent counter-espionage bureaucracy. It will assess the role of the Second Anglo-Boer War as an incubator for some of the principal, but illiberal, concepts, legislations and practices that were later woven into the fabric of the Secret Service Bureau in peace- and wartime. In addition, the Edwardian Spy-Fever phenomenon – which provided fertile soil to greatly expand Britain’s counter-espionage apparatus by inciting anti-German sentiment – will also be considered. Last, I will explore the roles of key individuals – such as James Edmonds, William Le Queux and Vernon Kell – in identifying, promoting and then offering solutions to Britain’s counter-espionage vulnerabilities.

Political control of coordination? The roles of ministerial advisers in government coordination in Denmark and Sweden

Ministerial advisers are said to strengthen the political control of bureaucracy. Using a comparative case design, this article investigates this claim by studying the roles of ministerial advisers in government coordination in Denmark and Sweden. The article demonstrates how the roles of advisers differ in coordination: Swedish advisers directly control government coordination through hierarchical authority. The roles of advisers and bureaucrats are functionally differentiated in coordination. In contrast, Danish advisers play a more indirect role in coordination. Rather than controlling coordination, they serve to reproduce the functional politicization of the permanent bureaucracy in government coordination. The findings underline the relevance of including advisers in the future study of government coordination. The analysis is based on 48 interviews with advisers and top civil servants in Denmark and Sweden.

Ministerial advisers between political change and institutional legacy: The case of Italy

A widespread strategy to enhance political control over permanent bureaucracy consists of the politicization of personnel policy through the appointment of ministerial advisers. This study sets out to investigate the appointment of ministerial advisers from an historical institutionalist perspective emphasizing the influence of institutional legacies on current empirical patterns. Drawing on this perspective, it identifies three patterns of institutional stability, radical, and gradual change in terms of ministerial advisers’ policy competence and political loyalty, which guide the empirical analysis. Empirical patterns are illustrated with data collected in Italy, based on an analysis of a combination of career pathways and expert interviews. The Italian case is noteworthy since it experienced an abrupt party system breakdown in the early 1990s. Yet, the empirical analysis reveals that the massive re-alignment of the party system has not implied a pattern of radical change in Italy. The legacy of stable administrative structures has only left room for gradual change to occur on the dimensions of ministerial advisers’ policy competence and political loyalty.

When Politics Matters: The Impact of Politicians' and Bureaucrats' Preferences on Salient and Nonsalient Policy Areas

For three decades, the “politics matters” literature has found that political ideology is an important explanation of public policy. However, this literature systematically fails to include the influence of the bureaucracy. In fact, it is almost impossible to identify a single study in this literature that controls for the influence of the permanent bureaucracy. In this article, we investigate whether politics still matters when bureaucratic preferences are taken into account. We do this in a simultaneous test of political and bureaucratic influences on public budgets, a policy measure often studied in the “politics matters” literature. We find that political preferences trump bureaucratic ones in policy areas salient to the public but not in less salient areas. This might be comforting news from a democratic perspective. However, as public budgets represent an easy case for political influence, it is food for thought that political preferences do not always prevail.

A Rejoinder to Biggar

First of all, it is illusory to think preventing firms from recouping investments prudently incurred can protect the interests of consumers - the opposite is true. For example, if the regulator, confronted with an adverse cost shock, shifts the burden of that shock on to investors in the regulated business, thus stranding investments prudently made, the effect is simply to increase the risk premium those investors will demand in future. In the long run, that higher premium must be reflected in increased supply costs and so in prices or subsidies, affecting consumers, taxpayers or both. Second, Biggar's suggestion that creating an entity that acts as a consumer representative solves any of the contracting problems I referred to seems inconsistent with both analysis and experience. After all, such an entity still has to identify preferences and aggregate them in a meaningful way; why merely having such a body should make those tasks more tractable is unclear. Moreover, there are obvious issues of governance associated with such entities. The US experience is that they are often captured by self-styled consumer advocates, whose focus ranges from promoting 'green' schemes (despite their higher costs) to a naive form of populism. I would suggest that has also been the Australian experience with consumer advocates in telecommunications. Third, just as regulators are not like central banks, so regulators are neither courts nor judges, for reasons explored in Ergas (2009). Precisely because the regulatory task is relatively loosely defined and relies on the collection and analysis of a wide range of information (and so requires a permanent bureaucracy), it cannot be shoehorned into the constraints we impose on courts. Those constraints, which minimise the opportunities for courts to be 'captured' or to themselves engage in rent-seeking, include severe restrictions on the manner in which information is presented (embodied in the law of evidence and in the rules of proceeding), the nature of the interaction between the court and the parties and the complex structure of appeals. In contrast, economic regulators are generally subject only to the fairly permissive requirements of

A Cacophony of Dissonance

A Cacophony of Dissonance

Principal-agent theory in complex operations

Originally developed for identifying costs of coordination between labor and management in economics, principal-agent theory challenged traditional explanations for friction in political relations, especially in a democracy, between elected officials and the permanent bureaucracy. Not without controversy, the approach recasts democratic civil–military relations, featuring as agent a unique, military ‘bureaucrat’ refining goals of the state, a role normally assigned to the principal. At the same time, principal-agent applications reached international institutions as a collective actor in their own right. Drawing from civil–military relations and international institutions, this article poses still greater expansion for principal-agent dynamics. Principal-agent theory offers significant promise in complex international operations mixing inter-state, state, sub-state, and nongovernmental organizations because it clearly delineates culturally bounded normative arguments from resource-based logics; it also suggests moves such as building flexible membership institutions ahead of time to improve cooperation among international actors during the next crisis.

Carers’ perspectives of respite care in Australia: An evaluative study

Caring for someone with dementia is burdensome and challenging. In Australia, respite services help carers to cope with these demands. In this descriptive study, 62 carers of people with dementia provided information on their use of respite care, its effectiveness and their satisfaction with services provided during the preceding 12 months. Results indicated that carers used day centre, in-home, residential, regular outings and cottage care. The main reasons for use were to assist with managing care, take a break, or attend to health problems. Although 78% of carers rated respite as beneficial to their care recipients, most suggested areas that required attention. Improvements included the need for more time and flexibility, better quality and more permanent staff, improved communication, bureaucracy, administration and affordability. Respite providers need to recognize these limitations and develop strategies to improve the delivery of diverse respite care for carers of people with dementia.

L'OTAN est-elle encore l'OTAN ?

NATO’s survival following the end of the Cold War contradicts the postulate of realists, according to whom military alliances are destined to collapse with the disappearance of the threat they are intended to counter. The Organization has even made a fundamental value out of its ability to transform itself, an ability that seems to have been demonstrated by its unprecedented humanitarian and military operations and its enlargement to include new members. The central dynamic at work here is the transformation of an alliance defending Europe and North America into a crisis management organization that above all intervenes outside of its territory. Yet what permits NATO to survive is the institutionalization of certain arrangements favoring stability : a permanent bureaucracy and command structure, the relative homogeneity of its members (which are now all democracies) and a decision-making process marked by the preeminence of the United States and respect for sovereignty by the principle of unanimity. The Organization’s transformation is nevertheless limited by divergences within its ever-growing and more diverse membership and by the inertia of the organizational apparatus. Studying change within NATO shows that the various types of change that can affect an international organization – its structure, membership and normative and cognitive dimensions – do not necessarily go without saying.

Potential Advantages of Virtual Institutions

Social institutions are critical to organization and stability. Governments, businesses, markets, military, schools, hospitals, families, and churches are all complex institutions that provide services through an elaborate system of social organization. These institutions are designed to provide specific services to their constituencies by acquiring resources, by converting those resources to services, and by maintaining a permanent bureaucracy to create and deliver those services.

Economic Crisis, Public Administration, and Governance

The global financial crisis that began in 2008 has had a significant impact on public administration in most countries in the world. This paper explores several dichotomies in which each of two opposing approaches to pub- lic management are frequently advocated and may be appropriate in different circumstances: path dependence (adhering to existing policies or changing course), centralization or decentralization, politicization (reliance on political appointees or the permanent bureaucracy), coordination and coherence or reten- tion of power by individual ministries or agencies, and time perspective (the search for quick relief or long-term solutions). The crisis has disrupted the sta- bility of public administration in many countries. At the same time, it has facili- tated policy and institutional changes that otherwise might not have been possi- ble to implement. Different countries, experiencing the current economic crisis in different ways, have chosen different options within these dichotomies, with varying levels of success.

Bankruptcies, Bailouts and the Banking Bureaucracy: The Bush Agenda and the Capacity for Crisis

True crises, such as the recent failure of the financial markets, test the capacity of the permanent bureaucracy. Leadership, responsiveness, and creativity, as well as stability and practicality, were put to the test in the intense summer and fall months of 2008. Major financial institutions failed or sat on the brink of failure, liquidity froze, the credit market vanished, foreclosure rates soared, and the government struggled to prevent further economic collapse. Just as critically, the capacities of regulatory foresight and independence, along with long-standing regulatory procedures, had in effect been tested in the decade leading up to the crisis. What was the impact of the Bush Administration's management of the financial regulatory bureaucracy over his eight-year presidency? What was its impact in the midst of the crisis at the close of his last term? This paper examines the longer-term capacity of foresight—the expertise and independence to see a crisis on the horizon and to speak truth to power in the midst of economic boom time—and the short-term capacities of responsive competence in the form of policy and administrative answers to the immediate challenges of the crisis itself.

Right Turn?

Principal-agent models can justify political management of career officials, while at the same time predicting challenges to it, in part reflecting the different ideological goals of careerists and political appointees. Indeed, the “administrative presidency” strategies Ronald Reagan pursued anticipated and heightened such conflict through attempts to “politicize” the federal executive. Such strategies may help account for the findings of Aberbach and Rockman that the political views of the permanent bureaucracy moved to the right from 1986-1987 to 1991-1992. We extend their work, using data from mail surveys sent to senior careerists in 1987-1988 and 1993-1994 to test propositions about the responsiveness of senior careerists to political principals and the relationships between careerists and appointees. The findings underscore not only the importance of agency mission in explaining senior civil servants’ relations with appointees, but also the flexibility in managing agencies available to appointees that careerists’ overall centrism and professional norms appear to provide.

Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican (review)

Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican. By Sarah McPhee. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 353. $60.00.) To students of seventeenth-century Rome, the title of Sarah McPhee's book will bring to mind the city's most famous artist, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and the one great failure in his otherwise remarkably successful life. The author, however, has replaced the familiar biographical narrative with a more complex and less personal history. The dramatic components of the story are still there-the facade of St. Peter's cracking under the weight of the bell tower built by Bernini, the subsequent recriminations and criticism of his design, the artist's hasty preparations for flight, and with the dismantling of the tower, his defiant answer to his critics in an over life-sized statuary group representing Truth Revealed by Time-but they have been handled critically and subsumed in a larger narrative about the history of St. Peter's and the institutional practices that govern the Church even today. Replacing the original Constantinian basilica with what was to be the grandest and most splendidly decorated church in Europe proved to be no easy task for the Popes, either ideologically or physically. Old St. Peter's and its millennial history cast a long shadow; the Papacy had changing needs for representation, and the vast scope of the project meant that design, decision making, and execution had to pass through the hands of a permanent bureaucracy attached to the church. McPhee shows how all of these factors played into the failed attempt by three popes, Paul V, Urban VIII, and Innocent X, to complete the twin towers flanking Carlo Maderno's facade. The book is especially good on the workings and politics of the Fabbrica of St. Peter's, which consisted of a Congregation of Cardinals charged with overseeing work on the church and its salaried technical staff headed by an architect, the office held first by Maderno and then, following his death in 1629, by Bernini. The author adduces numerous new documents regarding the Fabbrica and its deliberations and in the process overturns many old assumptions underlying previous histories of the towers. Bernini, better known as a sculptor and frequently described as lacking architectural experience, acquires engineering skill in the person of his brother, Luigi; Virgilio Spada, usually thought to be a partisan of Francesco Borromini, Bernini's chief critic, is revealed to be a supporter, along with his brother, Cardinal Bernardino Spada, of the artist's project; Innocent X, often charged with being indifferent to the arts, appears keenly interested in architecture; and what usually appears a devastating cacophony of criticism directed at Bernini and the tower he built resolves into an orderly debate grounded in reason and professional expertise and one from which the artist actually emerges the clear winner. …

The Presidency, the Bureaucracy, and Reinvention: A Gentle Plea for Chaos1

The relative influences of the unique and traditional elements of the Clinton‐Gore National Performance Review (NPR) episode of bureaucratic reform are examined here as a means of exploring the underlying dynamics of executive‐bureaucratic relationships. The first section of the article outlines the reinvention theory underlying NPR. This is followed by an analysis of how NPR deviated from that theory. The third section of the article considers what reforms might have been proposed by NPR had it taken reinvention theory more seriously. And fourth, the author discusses the deeper problems of presidential implementation of any reform not founded on enhanced hierarchical control of the bureaucracy by the White House. Finally, a unidirectional cycle of presidential reform is described, a cycle that seems impervious to and unconnected with scholarly work on management.