Conflicting Values at Stake

1
Conflicting Values at Stake

• To hire public employees on the basis of merit
  rather than on political connections
• To manage public employees effectively
• To treat equal employees equally
• Responsiveness and representativeness

2
Areas of National Variation

• The civil service idea and political neutrality
• Close or open structure
• Structure of the public service uniformity or
  fragmentation generalists or specialists
  position or rank classification
• Status of the public service instrument of
  politics or guardian of state interests
• degree of regulation and centralized controls

3
Why National Variations?

• Conception of role of the state the state as an
  arena of political conflict or the state as a
  guardian of general interest or general will
• Sequence of the emergence and growth of the
  following three developments
• democracy
• civil service system
• expansion of bureaucratic functions and structure
  (hence the need for effective management and
  leadership)

4
Hugh Heclo on the U.S. Civil Service

• In its search for an accepted role the U.S. civil
  service has been the victim of not only
  constitutional design but also of its own
  history. The U.S. civil service system, unlike
  that in other Western democracies, developed well
  after democratic political parties and mass
  political participation but somewhat ahead of
  industrialization and the accompanying expansion
  of central government bureaucracies In the last
  quarter of the nineteenth century, when the first
  stirrings of modern bureaucratic power associated
  with industrialization were being felt, civil
  service reformers were already concentrating on
  an older American problem

5
Hugh Heclo

• How to reverse the intrusion of political party
  spoils into the work of government
  administration. History thus bequeathed a concern
  that focused somewhat more on negative
  protections and somewhat less on the positive
  duties and the direction of the U.S. civil
  service.

6
Key Areas of Managing the Public Service

• Merit, Entry and Examination
• Classification system and structure of the public
  service
• Appraisal and Pay
• Over-regulation
• Bureaucratized versus professionalized service

7
What Does Merit Mean?

• Inherently ambiguous nature of the meaning of
  merit what are the qualities most relevant to
  jobs?
• Examination and merit
• written test and other forms of prediction such
  as job interviews, reference checks or amount of
  experiences
• earmarked examinations or relying on professional
  qualification
• testing general ability or job-specific tests

8
The Experience of the PACE in the U.S.

• A Test of general mental abilities and considered
  a good predictor of administrative ability
• The political aspect of the merit principle
  which groups benefit from a given format of
  examination?

9
Classification System and Structure of Public
Service

• Position classification the system of designing
  jobs, organizing them into useful managerial
  career categories, and establishing their rates
  of pay inherently complicated and calling for
  expertise in job analysis and management
• Rank classification the system in which ranks
  are vested in the individual officials occupying
  the positions. Individual officers are organized
  into different categories with different rates of
  pay

10
Classification System and Executive Leadership

• Rank classification and horizontal mobility of
  officials
• horizontal mobility of officials and overall
  executive leadership
• the Administrative Class in the British system
  and the Senior Executive Service in the U.S.

11
Pay for Performance

• Civil service pay and over-regulation
• apparent consensus on the need for linking pay
  with performance
• limited success the experience of the SES in the
  U.S.
• equal payment of bonuses to reduce internal
  conflict, the difficulties of evaluating
  individual performance, and to reduce the
  opportunities for misuse of public revenue

12
Reasons for the Limited Success of Performance Pay

• Bureaucratic Inertia
• Employees are skeptical about the idea of
  performance pay because they are afraid of giving
  more authority to managers
• Managers may not like performance pay either,
  because it means making hard-to-defend
  distinctions
• Politicians worry that this may lead to too wide
  a pay inequality
• Insistence on being cost neutral

13
Over-regulation

• National variations, specific political
  institutions and national culture
• an inherent feature of bureaucracy focusing not
  on national variations over-regulation as a more
  general phenomenon associated with a given form
  of organization

14
Bureaucratized versus Professionalized Service

• A central dilemma in public personnel system
  autonomy of the professionals and bureaucratic
  accountability
• Bureaucratized service a set of rules that
  specify who are to be hired, how they are to be
  managed, and what they are to do
• Professionalized service rules that specify who
  are to be hired but that leave great discretion
  to the members of the occupation to decide what
  they are to do and how they are to be managed

15
Key Political Issues in Managing the Public
Service

• Civil service idea and the role of politics in
  managing the public service
• responsiveness of the public service
• representativeness of the public service

16
Civil Service Idea

• Conception of the political neutrality of the
  public service (political neutrality understood
  as non-partisan)
• Britain neutrality of the public service and
  managing the public service is largely a
  managerial matter
• U.S. the neutrality of the public service is not
  taken for granted a greater role for politics

17
Responsiveness

• Responsive to whom?
• To the politicians holding public offices or to
  the public at large?
• Political patronage and responsiveness the great
  variations in western in the number of political
  appointees
• Ideological and political screening of senior
  civil servants

18
Representativeness

• The composition of the bureaucracies reflecting
  the composition of society at large
• need for representativeness and weak civil
  service idea
• representativeness leads to better responsiveness
• affirmative action seek to assure equality in
  the outcome of competition arguing that those
  who have been discriminated against so thoroughly
  in the past should be entitled to special,
  compensatory treatment until effects of past
  practices have been eliminated
• conflict of the affirmative action with the merit
  principle

19
Over-regulation and de-regulation of Public
Service

• Over-regulation Proliferation of personnel rules
  that protect the rights of public employees and
  constrain the powers of executive leaders of
  administrative agencies
• de-regulation changes of personnel rules to
  allow for more flexibility in personnel
  practices, and decentralization of powers over
  personnel matters from central personnel office
  to executive agencies

20
Civil Service Systems and Over-regulation

• Recruitment and promotion on merits
• political neutrality, career security and
  permanent employment
• the need for honest civil servants and career
  security
• equality equal pay for equal work the same pay
  for people holding the same position
• public sector unionism

21
Over-regulation in the U.S.

• Excessive reaction to a 19th century problems of
  political patronage
• a stronger emphasis on protection of the rights
  of public employees, less on glory and
  responsibilities of serving the state

22
The Case in Hong Kong

• No concern for political neutrality
• Based on the British model
• Need for a clean and honest government
• As of early 1999, there are a total of 189,282
  civil servants, only less than 2 are on contract
  terms close to 97 of civil servants are on
  pensionable term
• ease of granting pension and excessive protection
  of rights of employees

23
Explaining Civil Service Reform in Hong Kong

• What is the impetus of civil service reform in
  Hong Kong?
• Another step following the public sector reform
  starting in 1989?
• A response to public criticism of the defects of
  the civil service system?
• A response to the grievances of the public toward
  the civil service during economic recession?
• A strategy to deal with anticipated public
  finance crisis?

24
Problems of Over-regulation

• Similarly over-regulated across different
  countries?
• Careers in public service become unattractive
• poor morale within the public service
• poor performance and inefficiency

25
Should the public service be de-regulated?

• As a general principle, there seems to be almost
  universal consensus
• But a critical balance need to be maintained
  between a stable and honest civil service on the
  hand, and flexibility in personnel management on
  the other

26
How to do it?

• Strong political support
• political climate
• civil service reform in Hong Kong changing
  political and economic climate

27
Rules and Bureaucracy

• What do the people expect from the public
  service?
• To be efficient, to be honest, to be accountable,
  to treat equal people equally
• the conflict among solutions to all these problems

28
Rules and Inefficiency

• Is government really inefficient?
• Narrow meaning of efficiency
• Broader meaning of efficiency
• When we complain that government bureaucracy is
  inefficient, we are often using the narrow view
  of inefficiency
• a real difficulty we lack objective ways for
  deciding how much money or time should be devoted
  to maintaining honest behavior, producing a fair
  allocation of benefits, generating popular
  support as well as to achieving the main goal of
  the project

29
Rules and Arbitrariness

• Two important conflicts
• conflict between efficiency and reducing
  arbitrariness
• conflict between fairness (following the rules)
  and responsiveness
• uncertainty is power

30
Gains and Losses of Rules

• Clear rules induce agencies to produce observable
  outcomes, but not hard-to-observe processes
• Rules create offices,procedures, and claims
  inside an organization that can protect
  precarious values, but hey also generate
  paperwork and alter human relationship in ways
  that can reduce the ability of the organization
  to achieve its goals and its incentive to
  cooperate with those who enforce the rules
• Rules specify minimum standards that must be met,
  but they always become maximum standards