Civil Service System Research Articles

New Public Management in Bangladesh: Policy and Reality

New Public Management (NPM) is a management philosophy used by the government since 1980s to modernize the public sectors. Many developed and developing nations are now experimenting about the applicability of NPM in their context. In Bangladesh, NPM reform ideas have also been recommended by international donor agencies as well as numerous reform committees but yet the country has hardly made any progress in establishing effective public management. This paper attempts to identify some administrative reforms in Bangladesh that have the spirit of NPM as well some peculiarities that threaten successful implementation of NPM in Bangladesh. It is argued that state incapacity, bureaucratic failure and donor-driven reform policies are responsible for the failure of implementation of NPM in Bangladesh. Therefore, to establish efficient public management or to follow NPM model, Bangladesh need to have solid institutional frameworks, sound rule of law, proper control structures, appropriate checks and balances, effective civil service system, appropriate accountability and transparency; and for these political leaders, bureaucrats and donor-agencies have to work in line.

Comparison of Civil Service Reform in the United States and Korea: Central Personnel Agencies and Senior Civil Service Systems

Recent changes to the Korean civil service system, such as the introductionof the Senior Civil Service system in 2006 and the elimination of theCivil Service Commission in 2008, superficially resemble changes introduced bythe Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 in the United States. This study comparesthe structures and characteristics of the two countries` civil service systems, theirreforms, and the political context and processes by which reform legislationcame to pass. Based on this comparison, policy implications are drawn forimproving the Korean civil service system.

The post-independence civil service in Kosovo: A message of politicization

This contribution discusses the politicization of the civil service system in Kosovo as a framework through which politicians exert influence in the system. The article employs the concept of formal-political discretion, as a means of explaining and elucidating the extent to which both the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and current legislation regulating civil service preconditions/pre-favours the politicization of the senior civil service in Kosovo. It first discusses the concept of politicization based upon current scholarship and gives hints on the way in which these concepts fit with both UNMIK and Kosovo’s current situation. Next, the article discusses and compares the previous civil service system built by UNMIK with the current one – built in post-independence Kosovo based upon the formal-political discretion model. The article further argues that the former system of civil service – in contrast to the current system – provided less formal-political discretion to political elites with which to politicize the senior civil service. The article concludes by suggesting that the current post-independence legislation regulating the civil service grants the executive institutions a significant level of formal-political discretion in the appointment, dismissal and promotion of civil servants.Points for practitionersThe articles offers a thorough, both theoretical and practical, policy explanation of the model and structure of Kosovo's civil service, hinting on the previous and current legislative gaps that allow for partisan influence and control. The article also portrays the routes via which the politicization of the civil service in Kosovo is being developed, giving insights on how civil servants perceive such a process. Comparing the previous civil service system with the current one, the article informs practitioners on the directions that the new reform on Kosovo's civil service should take. Finally, the article provides in-depth policy information on the means to redesign the key protection mechanisms of Kosovo's senior civil service management.

Structural Changes in Chinese Corruption

AbstractGiven the rapid economic and administrative evolution that China has undergone during the last three decades, it is likely that corruption in China has been directly and indirectly affected by the changes that have taken place. However, the existing literature pays little attention to the impact of such changes on Chinese corruption, while emphasizing the seriousness of corruption. This article reviews how the major causes of Chinese corruption in the reform era have been alleviated in the 2000s. Some of the recent changes include the progress of the market economy, the advent of a merit-based civil service system, improvement of the budgeting and auditing system, fiscal recentralization and better monitoring of local governments' activities, and progress in anti-corruption regulation and enforcement. Consequently, we hypothesize that changes in the causes of corruption have led to structural changes in Chinese corruption. Our empirical analyses reveal that administrative reform has resulted in a decrease in the number of corruption cases related to the internal administrative process (embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds). At the same time, we also observe the aggravation of bribery. This suggests that Chinese corruption has made a transition from being an administrative issue to being a private–public transactional problem.

The US Army Projects the Effect of Merit Pay on Payroll Growth

The National Security Personnel System (NSPS) was designed to provide greater opportunity for merit-based pay raises than the preexisting civil service system. However, a US Army organization was concerned that over time the accumulation of merit raises would make the total payroll unaffordable. We were asked to investigate the conditions under which this situation would be likely to happen. We used the Vensim® modeling software to produce a model of the influences and events that would cause payroll to rise or fall from year to year. Our analysis showed that the merit pay policies in place at the start of our study were very likely to lead to undesirable growth in total pay and a concentration of all employees near the maximum allowed salary, defeating the purpose of NSPS—to reward better service with more pay. The most important factors were the fraction of merit pay that was given as merit raises (as opposed to bonuses) and the salaries of people newly hired to replace those who left the organization. We showed how departing senior employees should be replaced with less-senior ones to avoid long-term payroll growth. We used the model to find the combinations of merit pay and new-hire policies that would balance the effect of these two major influences and produce little or no long-term payroll growth. We also showed that some other influences that had concerned the client were actually of small effect compared to the stochastic uncertainty in payroll growth. Another influence, attrition, produced a more substantial effect. The interactive nature of the model allowed real-time exploration of alternatives with the client and helped build confidence in the robustness of the results. These results highlight potential problem areas needing careful analysis in implementing similar merit pay systems.

The historical institutionalism analysis of Taiwan’s administrative reform

Government restructuring has been discussed extensively in Taiwan for more than three decades, and the first NPM-style administrative reform programme, which emphasizes ‘a leaner and businesslike government’, was launched in 1996. Since then, NPM has been the key guideline producing a strong path-dependence effect for subsequent administrative reform programmes in Taiwan. This article examines the trajectory of administrative reform in Taiwan from 1949 to 2010, the latter being the year when the Organizational Act of the Executive Yuan was passed, which symbolically represents the end of the current phase of administrative reform. Similar to many Asian countries, exogenous and endogenous factors have induced efforts at administrative reform in Taiwan. Although it is argued that it is difficult to generate any common path of administrative reform among Asian countries, the analysis of the case in Taiwan may provide some observations for future discussions on this topic, such as evidence of political manipulation, the transformation of the role of the state, the desire for an indigenous reform strategy, and the demand to revitalize the civil service system. Points for practitioners 1. Administrative reform is a political process, and pubic servants have to deal with value conflicts carefully. 2. Professionalism and political neutrality are the two most important things in the administrative reform process. 3. Public servants can have a critical role in the administrative reform process when the critical juncture appears, but democratic values and public purposes should be the cornerstone for the bureaucrats in action.

China’s Administration and Civil Service Reform

To promote economic development, Chinese policymakers have implemented many policies to reform their country’s administration and civil service system since the late 1970s. In the area of civil service reform, the Chinese government adopted the Provisional Regulations on State Civil Servants in 1993 and then the Law of Civil Servants in 2005 to emphasize professional personnel management concepts and methods in the Chinese civil service. This symposium introduction provides a brief review of the development of reform policies and a summary of five articles that examine concepts and cases of government reforms, values present in the civil service reform, challenges in appraising employee performance, experiences of civil service training, and lessons of pay reform as it relates to public corruption. The overall re-form lessons and their implications are discussed in the conclusion section.

Le direct primaries come contributo alla riforma dello Stato negli USA (1865-1915)

The movement for direct primaries in the USA has been unable to produce significant effects until it succeeded in constructing an alliance with two others movements: the Civil Service Reform Movement and the Short Ballot Movement. Until then, the direct primaries movement had been unable to obtain stable majorities in the States, while later it became a major tool to contrast corruption inside the parties and in the civil service system. This essay describes the contribution the direct primaries gave, in the USA, to the reform of the State. As far as the empirical research argumentation is concerned, this contribution introduces only a part (the one concerning the USA between 1865 and 1915) of a more complex comparative design, which is structured on two approaches: a synchronic one (the state of the political system in Italy from 1871 to 1901 compared to the US system from 1865 to 1915) and a diachronic one (the state of the political system in Italy from 1892 to 1922 compared to the political system in Italy from 1992 to 2010). The main conclusions of the research, as well as of the pages presented here, are: a) many differences occur between the changes introduced at the end of the XIX century in the US system (which enforced the quality of democracy) and the changes introduced in the Italian system (which instead weakened the quality of democracy and contributed to the crisis of the Italian liberal State and to the advent of fascism); b) the primaries experienced in Italy in the last years, are quite different from the direct primaries realised in the USA, being instead more similar to the kind of primaries contrasted by the direct primaries movement at the end of the XIX century.

The Past and Present: A Note on the Civil Service of Kosovo: Discussing its Design, Independence, and Management

This article assesses Kosovo's post-independence efforts to reform the civil-service system and establish a merit-based civil-service system. It also provides an overview of the relationship between civil service and other political institutions and asks whether the constitutional choices have—to a certain degree—influenced the existing design of the civil service. Moreover, the article exposes the current trend of politicization and describes the models through which the latter is developing. Finally, the article asks whether the current system of recruitment, promotion, and appointment of senior managing staff preconditions a political civil-service system.

Position Islands on the Career Sea: An Evaluation of the Open Competitive Position System in Korea

In the 1990s, the Korean civil service was more criticized for its lower levels of competitiveness and productivity than was the private sector due to excessive job security and seniority-based personnel management under the career civil service system. To overcome the prevailing problems, the Korean government introduced the Open Competitive Position System (OPS) in 1999. The goal of the OPS is to appoint the most qualified persons to certain positions through open recruitment from both the public and private sectors. Under the new system, about 20 percent of senior positions are open to outside candidates, whereas the others are under the career-based system. In 2005, there were 156 OPS positions in 43 government organizations. Analyzing the several survey results and statistics from 2000 to 2005, this study evaluates the implementation of the OPS by reviewing its appropriateness, overall trend, performance, spillover effects, and problems and limitations. The study concludes that the OPS positively performed for more than five years. The OPS has shown that the government must open more jobs to competition from the outside if it wants to be more competitive.

Control Over the Korean Bureaucracy: A Review of the NPM Civil Service Reforms Under the Roh Moo-Hyun Government

This study reviews the new public management (NPM) civil service reform initiatives under the Roh Moo-Hyun government in Korea. The main emphases in the discussion are placed on interpreting the reform efforts in terms of the measures for bureaucracy control, and examining the possibilities and limitations of the new NPM reforms in Korea.This study adopts as a theoretical guidance, the “control mechanisms of the civil service system” suggested by Christopher Hood. This study raises the issue of culture in the expansion of the NPM doctrines in the East Asian context. It is argued that the Korean administrative culture could be a serious constraint affecting the potential for the NPM reforms. The authors conclude that despite some positive control effects of the NPM reform measures on the overall Korean civil service system, there are many limitations that still exist in both the reform measures and in their outcomes.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Comparative Chinese/American Public Administration

In the field of public administration practice, China has a history of several thousand years, whereas the United States has a much shorter history of hundreds of years of governance. In terms of the scholarly development of public administration in China, the roots of those intellectual resources can be traced far back, to Confucius’s ideology of governance and the ancient development of a civil service system some 2,000 years ago. In terms of the systematic development of public administration as an independent subject of learning, however, the United States has been a leader worldwide. Public administration as a discipline in the United States dates back to the late nineteenth century, with extensive scholarly research and publications in the early twentieth century (Follett 1926; Goodnow 1900; Taylor 1912; Weber 1922; White 1926). In the Chinese context, although there were occasional studies of public administration in the first half of the twentieth century, systematic study was deferred until the middle of the 1980s. They were only truly continued following the official launch of master of public administration degree programs at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. In this respect, China was a latecomer, and Chinese scholars almost always date the study and scholarship in this field to about 1980. Over the past eighty years or so, the United States has established more than 200 MPA and related programs, while China has founded 100 MPA programs in just the past eight years. Recognizing the urgent need for MPA training, China is trying to catch up to the demand for social development and societal transition. Considering that China has a population of 1.3 billion, compared to a population of 300 million in the United States, it looks as if there is great potential for China to expand its MPA programs.

The Basic Models, Characteristics, and Directions of Civil Service Reform in China: Based on Analysis of the Competence of the Civil Service

In recent years, in order to solve the high-tech needs of government departments and cut financial expenditures, the Chinese government has introduced civil service reforms and consequently created a position-rank two-track system. This paper is written from the perspective of increasing civil service competency. A review and explanation of some of China’s most pertinent current models of civil service reform such as those of Jilin, Zhuhai, and Shenzhen will be presented. Those models will also be compared with other traditional civil service systems. Specific points that will be addressed are hiring, wages and termination. The article finally points out that the fundamental future direction of civil service reform is to further rationalize the relationship between the existing civil service system and the government employee system, and then establish and regulate the criteria and procedures regarding civil service recruitment, appraisal, promotion, and exit.

Les services artistiques de la radio de Vichy : l'application hasardeuse de la législation antisémite

In the defeated France, the Vichy government made use of the National Broadcasting as the readiest organ for the new political trends. Under the rule of one of the most drastic services of the new State that was the General Office for Information and Propaganda, this service immediately undertook, as soon as the first status for the Jews was promulgated, to purge widely its various offices, which conveyed in fact a particularly outrageous interpretation of the actual legislation. The utterly discretionary exclusion of Jewish artists who had been engaged to enrich the programs of Vichy radio, reflects the gap between the intentions of the lawmaker – the exclusion of the Jews from the posts where they could be influential – and the difficulty in trying to adapt a law to an intricate service, placed at the intersection between civil service and culture system.

Die Zukunft des Beamtentums: Zwischen Recht und Politik, Staats- und Verwaltungslehre

German public law, which is heavily dependent on the rulings of the Federal Constitutional Court, predominantly sees the future of the German civil service system in terms of its close ties with the “traditional principles of the professional civil service“, which in accordance with Article 33(5) of the Basic Law were to be considered in the regulation of the civil service after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. It is claimed that the Rechtsstaat is only possible if civil servants exist whose legal status is structured in accordance with these principles. This view is supported by a tendentious interpretation and a partial glorification of the history of the civil service, particularly in Prussia. According to this view, civil servants have a stake in public authority, specifically as an autonomous element in the separation of powers and as a counterweight to the political forces in parliament and government. This requires the strict separation of politics and administration. Administration is perceived to have a “technocratic“ nature and to be the exclusive task of “experts“. Yet, this standard interpretation fails to take account of the fact that the constitution does not prescribe such a close bond with time-honored principles and that, in the context of the Federalism reform, a constitutional amendment sought to correct the court rulings by calling on these principles to undergo further development. This view is confined to German national history and assumes that only this status guarantees reliable administration in conformity with the law. Civil servants are no longer a separate “power“ within the state; and the administration does not act non-politically. The future of the civil service will depend less on the traditional principles of German civil service law, and more, among other things, on the extent to which public-sector tasks are contracted-out and privatized, and whether the values and behavioral patterns of business management will assert themselves.

汚職と経済発展のパラドックス

Most of recent statistical studies show corruption is incompatible with rapid economic development. In South Korea, however, the miraculous economic growth was attained despite the existence of ample corruption. This paper tries to explain this riddle through deductive exploration of the rational behavior of bureaucrats in the Korean institutional framework. The model assumes that there were various types of bureaucrats, yet all of them were basically rational utility maximizers, competing with each other for promotion regardless of their official or personal purposes and propensities. The rule was clearly defined within the newly-established merit-based civil service system, and all they had to do there, in fact, was to make greater contribution to the leadership's ultimate target of economic development. Under the extremely goal-oriented public administration of the developmental state, the performance of the economy was always closely monitored and regularly reported, by which the performance of the relevant bureaucratic agencies as well as that of the persons in charge was revealed. In other words, bureaucrats, regardless of their individual interests, always needed to achieve good performance in order to be promoted. Even if they were corrupt, their corruption should not gravely hinder the good performance.

경찰 근무성적평정에 대한 검증제 도입의 필요성과 시행방안

특정직 공무원은 별도의 인사법규를 근거로 일반직과 다른 개별 인사행정을 시행하고 있다. 조직과 임무가 특수한 만큼 일반직에 대한 인사행정을 적용하는 것은 여러 면에서 문제점이 야기될 수 있다. 경찰공무원 역시 특정직으로 타 공직과는 상이한 형태의 인사행정을 시행하고 있다. 그런데 이러한 개별적 인사행정은 많은 장점을 가질 수 있으나 그에 못지않은 단점도 발생할 수 있다. 본 연구에서는 타 공직과 상이하게 운영되고 있는 경찰 근무성적평정 제도의 바람직한 운영을 도모하기 위해 평정결과에 대한 검증절차의 도입을 제안하였다. 다만, 제도시행 초기에는 검증대상을 최종 평정권자로 한정하는 것이 바람직할 것이다. The Police are classed special service on civil service system. Most of special service officers are applied special personal law. It is reason that organization and mission are different from general public officials. The police performance evaluation is enforced in dissimilar form with another civil services for these cause. This study proposed to verification formality about appraisal result to desirable operation of police performance evaluation system. At system enforcement early, it may be desirable that verification is limited finally supervisors rating.

A Study on the Civil Service System in Germany

A Study on the Civil Service System in Germany

A Critical Review of the Sweeping Federal Civil Service Changes

This article critiques the proposed radical changes to the civil service system at the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense. It also summarizes the civil service problems and assesses whether the proposed changes would be likely to address those problems. It identifies the difficulties that one of the critical changes (merit pay or pay-for-performance) has encountered in the past. The article is critical of the proposed termination of the General Schedule system, which has served the civil service system so well in the past. It expresses concern about the proposed weakening of rights of employee appeals, protections, and meaningful union participation. The article argues that there are a number of problems facing the civil service, but that most of the changes do not address those problems. It lauds the major achievements of the federal service and cautions against radical changes that will have the effect of weakening it.

The Reform of Civil Service System in China : The Performance and Limits of Enacting <the Civil Service Act> of 2005

The Reform of Civil Service System in China : The Performance and Limits of Enacting <the Civil Service Act> of 2005