civil service

1. those branches of public service concerned with all governmental administrative functions outside the armed services.

2. the body of persons employed in these branches.

3. a system or method of appointing government employees on the basis of competitive examinations, rather than by political patronage.

[1775-85]

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Body of government officials employed in civil occupations that are neither political nor judicial.

In well-ordered societies, they are usually recruited and promoted on the basis of a merit-and-seniority system, which may include examinations; elsewhere, corruption and patronage are more important factors. They often serve as neutral advisers to elected officials and political appointees. Though not responsible for making policy, they are charged with its execution. The civil service originated in the earliest known Middle Eastern societies; the modern European civil services date to 17th-and 18th-century Prussia and the electors of Brandenburg. In the U.S., senior officials change with each new administration. In Europe, regulations were established in the 19th century to minimize favouritism and to ensure a wide range of knowledge and skills among civil service officers. See also Chinese examination system; spoils system.

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Introduction

      the body of government officials who are employed in civil occupations that are neither political nor judicial. In most countries the term refers to employees selected and promoted on the basis of a merit and seniority system, which may include examinations.

Appointment

      In earlier times, when civil (civil service) servants were part of the king's household, they were literally the monarch's personal servants. As the powers of monarchs and princes declined and as, in some countries, their sovereignty was denied them, appointment became a matter of personal choice by ministers and heads of departments. The influence senior civil servants may wield over policy and the need for them to work in close harmony with ministers induce all governments to insist on complete freedom of choice in appointments, even when, as in Great Britain, the freedom is rarely invoked. In some countries, notably the United States, senior advisers usually are replaced whenever a new administration takes office.

      In Europe in the 19th century, appointment and promotion frequently depended on personal or political favour, but tenure was common in the lower and middle ranks once an appointment had been made.

      Dependency on a superior's favour led civil servants to ally themselves with liberal public opinion, which was critical of the waste and corruption involved in political patronage. Pressure for reform led to official formulations of basic qualifications for different posts; appointments and promotions boards were established within each department to prevent or obstruct overt political favouritism and nepotism; and salary scales were introduced for different grades to provide a civil servant with increments for good service while still holding the same post. In many countries civil service commissions were set up to ensure impartiality in selection procedures and to lay down broad principles for personnel management in the civil service. Recruitment in many European countries corresponded to the national educational systems: the highest class of civil servants entered service after graduation from a university, the executive class after full completion of secondary school, the clerical class after the intermediate school examination. The manual workers in the service were mainly recruited from persons of mature age who had left school after primary education or, in such countries as France and Germany, from military veterans. As public administration became more complex in the 20th century, specialized categories of civil servants were created to bring into the service doctors, scientists, architects, naval constructors, statisticians, lawyers, and so on. In several countries the establishment of these special classes caused some difficulties because their salary scales had to be linked with those of competing professional groups outside the service. The distinction between foreign service and home service personnel has sometimes caused difficulty because of inadequate liaison between overseas representatives and the makers of foreign policy at home. In the United States, the Rogers Act of 1924 unified the overseas service itself, but the civil servants of the State Department in Washington, D.C., continued to be regarded as part of the federal civil service.

      The posts that fall under the rules of the U.S. merit system are not grouped into a small number of general classes but have individual job specifications and entry qualifications. Although designed to select entrants with special knowledge or skills for individual posts, this system has been criticized for failing to make the best use of the talent available to the government. In 1978 the Senior Executive Service was created to achieve more effective promotion and deployment.

      All countries base appointments on some kind of competition. In some countries great emphasis is placed on formal written examinations supplemented by interviews. Such is the situation in France, where entry into the higher civil service is channeled through specialist schools, or grandes écoles, of which the École Nationale d'Administration and the École Polytechnique are the most important. In Great Britain, traditionally one of the great advocates of entry by formal examination, the Civil Service Commission relies more on informal tests and a series of interviews and observations and tends to measure the candidate's intellectual competence by the quality of his university degree. The conventional written examination is dispensed with also in such European countries as Finland, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and Portugal, as well as the German Länder, or states. In the Länder the qualifications and references of all candidates are compared, whereupon the most eligible are interviewed by a departmental board. Candidates are expected to have completed a lengthy program of academic work for professional qualification and a period of subsequent training in a variety of public institutions under official supervision. If successful in their interviews, candidates are recommended to the minister, who makes appointments to higher grade posts, or to the heads of department, who handle the middle and lower categories. On the face of it, this method offers fewer guarantees of impartiality than does the formal written examination, but a civil service career is less attractive now than formerly and the civil service has to compete, usually at lower salaries, with business and the professions for the best available talent. In Sweden a constitutional provision requires that nearly all public documents (including the proceedings of authorities that make appointments) be open for public inspection, thus providing a check upon corruption or favouritism.

      Most federal and culturally diverse countries try to ensure an equitable distribution of posts among their constituent elements. In Switzerland the federal authorities try to maintain a balance of posts not only between the cantons but also between the political parties, religions, and languages. The federal civil service in Germany draws on the public service officers in the Länder, and some degree of proportional representation is attempted. There was considerable pressure in Canada in the 1970s to ensure a more equitable distribution of federal civil service posts between the English- and French-speaking populations. It is also clear that many African states are compelled to recognize regional and tribal origins in their appointments to the civil service.

Conditions of service

      The forerunners of civil servants, being members of the royal household, had duties but no rights. The first attempts to formalize methods of appointment and conditions of service were among the administrative innovations introduced in Prussia in the 18th century. Elsewhere attempts were frustrated by political and public objections. Increased formal regulation of conditions of service came about when civil servants organized themselves into professional groups, sometimes barely distinguishable from trade unions. The fact that civil servants are agents of the public power, providing services on which law, order, and public health depend, has raised the question whether they should be permitted to strike; (strike) if they cannot lawfully strike, they are deprived of the main weapon in pressing for improvements in their conditions of service. Thus, there have developed special arrangements for reviewing conditions of service periodically and for settling contentious issues. In particular, it has been necessary to have a properly recognized system for regulating conduct and discipline. In the United Kingdom, traditional standards are supplemented or revised to accord with recommendations from periodic commissions of enquiry, which pay special attention to official conduct in relation to political activities and business dealings. In France and Germany these codes of conduct have been based mainly upon the rules of administrative law and the jurisprudence of administrative courts, although certain civil service rights and duties are specified in constitutional law. In other countries, particularly in the United States and India, conduct and discipline are regulated by administrative rules and codes promulgated by executive order after discussion and enquiry.

      The standards placed upon a civil servant's conduct are partly those to be expected of any loyal, competent, and obedient employee and partly those enjoined upon a public employee. Ideally, the civil servant should be above any suspicion of partiality and should not let personal sympathies, loyalties, or interests affect the performance of duties; for example, a civil servant is obliged to be circumspect in private financial dealings. As a general rule, a civil servant is not allowed to engage directly or indirectly in any trade or business and may engage in social or charitable organizations only if these have no connection with official duties. There are always strict limits on a civil servant's right to lend or borrow money, and they are prohibited from accepting gifts.

Civil servants and politics

      There are different attitudes about the extent to which civil servants may engage in political activities. One view is that a civil servant has the same constitutional rights as other citizens and that it is therefore unconstitutional to attempt to limit those rights other than by the common law. The opposing view is that, since civil servants are engaged in the unique function of national government, their integrity and loyalty to their political masters might be affected by active participation in political affairs, and public confidence in their impartiality could be shaken. Broadly speaking, those countries that traditionally expect civil servants to behave with complete impartiality and to conform to ministerial policy with energy and good will, whether they agree with the policy or not, expect all civil servants to behave with circumspection in political affairs. The United Kingdom has a total ban on its senior civil servants engaging in any form of political activity. The prohibition becomes progressively less strict, however, for the medium and lower grades of the service.

      Another group of countries, including France and Germany, have deemed policy and administration to be so intimately connected that all top posts are filled at the discretion of the government of the day; thus, civil servants are allowed greater scope in political activities. They are nevertheless expected to act with greater discretion and public decorum than private citizens, and an excess of power or an abuse of office for political purposes renders a civil servant instantly liable both to statutory regulations and to severe internal disciplinary proceedings.

Civil servants and unions

      Traditionally, governments have been hostile toward civil service unions, and in the past repressive laws made strike action unlawful. Strikes nevertheless occurred, and governments eventually adopted an attitude of open encouragement toward trade unionism. Most governments accept, in theory at least, that the state should be a model employer. It follows that, if the state genuinely pursues a policy of discussion and negotiation with civil servants and attempts properly to fulfill agreements with them, it should in return be freed from the threat of strike action. Mindful that the withdrawal of civil servants from some public services would lead to chaos, many governments have found it prudent to establish permanent channels for negotiating such matters as salaries and discipline. Organizations representing the staff and a management side of senior officials representing the state mirror the employer–employee relationship of private industry, although a higher percentage of public- than private-sector employees are members of unions. The United Kingdom was the first country to establish negotiating machinery for civil servants. Following a report in 1917, organizations known as Whitley Councils (Whitley Council) were set up, consisting of equal numbers of medium and lower staff on the one hand and directing and supervisory staffs on the other. These councils operate within the ministries, and a National Whitley Council performs central advisory functions for the government. They have no powers of decision, however, only of recommendation, because governments are never prepared to surrender their ultimate responsibility for determining the public interest. The councils have done a good deal to provide a sense of common purpose and joint responsibility within the civil service as a whole, although pay restraints from the early 1970s generated great friction between civil service unions and government.

      In France each department has a comparable consultative body, but its work is broader in scope in that it can scrutinize recruitment, personnel records, promotions, and disciplinary procedures. There is also a national council, presided over by the prime minister or a specially nominated minister for civil service affairs, which is concerned with general personnel policy, conditions of service, and coordination of departmental committees.

      Until after World War II, the commonly accepted view in the United States was that expressed by President Calvin Coolidge (Coolidge, Calvin): “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at any time.” Although federal employees are still forbidden to strike, a rule illustrated by the dismissal of striking air traffic controllers in 1981, consultation has increased, and in many federal departments appeals committees comprising departmental heads and one or more members of the Merit Systems Protection Board may now hear appeals from civil servants against decisions adversely affecting their careers. These committees are also consulted on general matters of departmental interest, such as job classifications, pension schemes, promotion policies, and office procedures.

Patterns of control

      The expansion of public services, as well as the development of permanent civil service career structures, raised fears that civil services were becoming autonomous powers in their own right, no longer subject to the traditional forms of control. This view is associated with the sociologists Max Weber, who criticized the bureaucracy of imperial Germany, and Robert Michels (Michels, Robert), who formulated the “iron law of oligarchy.” Michels' law suggested that every organization with a permanent staff produces an oligarchy running the organization according to the interests and values of the bureaucratic group. In addition, the growing complexity of modern government has greatly augmented the informal power of senior civil servants who act as advisers to ministers. This is particularly the case in countries (usually the more democratic ones) where ministries frequently change hands.

      In the 19th century civil services were normally restricted to maintaining law and order and minor economic regulations such as those concerning weights and measures and factory laws. The subordination of civil servants to their political masters and their political masters' responsibility to the courts and legislatures seemed to provide an adequate safeguard against arbitrary administrative actions. But in some countries, notably Germany, France, and Austria, civil services became endowed with much greater authority, operating as part of the police power. This caused concern because civil servants were exempt from normal legal processes when performing their official functions. In response, special administrative courts were set up to which private citizens or corporations could appeal against administrative acts. Jurisdiction was limited, however, and redress was frequently slow. The courts themselves remained specialized institutions of the executive rather than normal parts of the judiciary.

       Sweden provided a marked contrast. Before the constitution of 1809 the executive power had been absolute. Afterward, not only did it become subject to control by the legislature, but this control also was reinforced by the creation of a special post of ombudsman (see administrative law: The ombudsman (administrative law)).

      World War I brought increased governmental activity almost everywhere. The area in which administrative discretion could be exercised grew; civil servants became as much adjudicators as administrators, and their influence upon economic life increased. By World War II the state had become, even in many conservative countries, an economic regulator, an industrial producer of overwhelming importance, and a conciliator between competing interests. In all of these matters civil servants were the effective agents of the state.

Responses to civil service power

      In the United States, Congress created an institution to counter the threatened increase in civil service power. As far back as the late 19th century Congress, when legislating for new areas of government, assigned powers to agencies or commissions, specifying their powers, competence, and composition and freeing them from direct presidential control. In this way large areas of government escaped the control of the executive branch of government, including the federal civil service. These independent regulatory agencies have covered major economic fields and have included the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This policy has laid Congress open to the charge that it has created a headless fourth branch of government, but it has successfully prevented the emergence of a monolithic federal civil service.

      To counter charges that the U.S. civil service was encroaching on the powers of the judiciary, the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 laid down detailed provisions to safeguard citizens' rights where the administration had powers of adjudication. These rights included the right to ample previous notice of proceedings, the right to submit evidence, the right to have independent hearing officers (to the exclusion of investigating or prosecuting officers), and the right to a decision based solely on testimony and papers actually entered in the proceedings.

      Other democratic countries have been concerned about the growing powers of the civil service and about whether traditional forms of judicial and ministerial control are adequate. Many European countries have modeled their instruments of administrative jurisdiction and jurisprudence on the French Conseil d'État. In the United Kingdom the creation of a special administrative jurisdiction of this kind has been opposed by both parliamentary and judicial opinion, but it was because of mounting criticism of civil service immunity from detailed control that Parliament created the special office of parliamentary commissioner, or ombudsman. Public access to the office is by way of a member of Parliament, and the commissioner is excluded from inquiring into matters of policy, local government authorities, or lower judicial bodies.

Civil servants and communism

      Special problems of control arose in Communist countries, where the main preoccupation of the regime, which was under the direct control of the Communist Party, had been to ensure the civil service's continual loyalty. Impartiality and objectivity in the administrative machine's dealings with the public were not of such high priority as in pluralist societies. A body of administrative procedure was built up, but this was always subordinated to the directives of the party leadership. Communist countries also had to establish new ways of judging performance, since the state monopoly of political power and means of production ensured that traditional incentives and yardsticks could not be applied.

      Yet in their own way, Communist countries had elaborate controls. In the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) all ministries had a special section staffed by, and responsible to, operatives from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). This section provided security control over the ordinary civil servants, and its personnel were not part of that ministry's official structure. The Communist Party maintained further control through the party apparatus, and it closely supervised senior appointments.

      Communist planning, financial, and personnel controls of a technical kind resembled those in democratic countries, but in the Soviet Union there were two additional special supervisory agencies. The Commission of State Control was responsible for vigilance over state property and administration. Its departments paralleled the different branches of state administration and maintained audits of their work. Its officers had the right of access to all administrative records and could issue directives to other institutions. They had powers to prosecute civil servants for criminal offenses, and they could apply a formidable range of disciplinary measures to civil servants, either by direct action or through the responsible minister.

      The second agency of control arose because of the difficulty of reconciling disputes between production units and their controlling ministries in an economy that lacked the traditional forms of market discipline and could not rely upon an enforceable law of contract. A special system of compulsory arbitration operated through the State Arbitration Tribunal (known as Gosarbitrazh) under the Council of Ministers and through arbitration tribunals responsible to the councils of ministers in each of the republics. It settled all disputes concerning contracts, quality of goods, and other property disputes between various state enterprises. The system was staffed by civil servants charged with enforcing “contractual and plan discipline,” but it was supported by technical experts qualified in economic and industrial matters.

Brian Chapman Edward C. Page

International civil service

      The elements of an international civil service first appeared in the Universal Postal Union (established 1874–75). Some four and a half decades later the League of Nations (Nations, League of) and the International Labour Organization (ILO (International Labour Organization)) were founded. They required a staff of almost 600 experts and subordinate personnel, which took the form of a true international civil service. It drew mainly on British, French, and Swiss personnel, but more than 40 states contributed members in order to spread recruitment as widely as possible. There were no formal methods of selection for the higher personnel; the secretary general of the League used personal contacts. The staff fell into three divisions: administrative, supervisory and clerical, and custodial. The history of the League shows that, at any rate as far as a secretariat was concerned, a broad measure of international loyalty could be achieved. The staff of the ILO was maintained after the League's disbandment in 1946.

      Until World War II the League of Nations was the only major international organization of its kind. Since then, international organizations have multiplied, and compared with most of them the League had a small staff. The postwar organizations include the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the European (European Union) Community (EC), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. By the mid-1980s there were nearly 20,000 smaller bodies, ranging from the Nordic Council to small research institutes.

      International organizations have evolved into two general types. In the first—an example of which is the EC—a genuinely supranational civil service exists; its members have a career structure within the organization and can identify with it. In the second (the UN, for instance), officials undertake a particular job for a limited period and seldom develop a career within the organization. In the EC the civil service is divided into four major grades, recruitment to the service generally being through competitive examination. After recruitment a period of training follows. Each agency within the UN operates its own recruitment system. By far the majority of senior appointees assigned to the UN at any one time have served there for less than 15 years.

      In both types of international organization, there is a danger that officials will promote the interests of their own country to the detriment of internationalism. In the UN a quota system operates by which each country is allocated a number of appointments in proportion to its UN budget contribution. As a result, some national governments are in a strong position to influence recruitment. In contrast, the statutes governing the EC's civil service forbid quotas, but an unofficial system has developed whereby a relatively high proportion of senior officials are from the more populous states. Such practices risk sacrificing meritocracy to nationalism.

      Some countries do expect their nationals working at the UN to promote national interests. But the quota system—and this is one of the arguments for it—leads to administrators from at least the more prosperous countries competing with fellow nationals rather than with colleagues from other countries. Moreover, it is unlikely that decisions, whether biased or not, will be made in the bureaucracy alone. And since officials' national origins are no secret, partiality is fairly difficult to conceal.

Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges Edward C. Page

Additional Reading

There are few general comparative studies on civil services. The important comparative works in the prewar period are Herman Finer, Theory and Practice of Modern Government, rev. ed. (1949, reprinted with a new introduction, 1970); Ernest Barker, The Development of Public Services in Western Europe, 1660–1930 (1944, reissued 1966); Leonard D. White (ed.), The Civil Service in the Modern State (1930), and The Civil Service Abroad: Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany (1935). The postwar comparative studies include Poul Meyer, The Administrative Organization: A Comparative Study of the Organization of Public Administration (1957); Edward C. Page, Political Authority and Bureaucratic Power: A Comparative Analysis (1985); and B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Bureaucracy, 2nd ed. (1984). For a wider discussion of public employment, including local and regional government officials and employees in public enterprises and health services, as well as a survey of the growth in public employment since the middle of the 19th century, see Richard Rose et al., Public Employment in Western Nations (1985). For a comparative public policy analysis, see Arnold J. Heidenheimer, Hugh Heclo, and Carolyn Teich Adams, Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in Europe and America, 2nd ed. (1983). Two classic works that established the modern theory of the relations between civil servants and the state are Rudolf Gneist, Der Rechtsstaat (1872); and Léon Duguit, Law in the Modern State (1919, reprinted 1970; originally published in French, 1913).European countries with long traditions of civil service government have very considerable bibliographies on various aspects of public administration. Useful surveys of the administrative systems of the larger European nations are found in F.F. Ridley (ed.), Government and Administration in Western Europe (1979). The special aspect of control of the civil service is dealt with in Charles E. Freedeman, The Conseil d'État in Modern France (1961; reprinted 1968). The political background to the struggle for civil servants' rights may be traced through Pierre d'Hughes, La Guerre des fonctionnaires (1912).The overall pattern of the federal civil service and administration in the United States is dealt with in Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 1787–1957: History and Analysis of Practice and Opinion, 5th rev. ed. (1984); and Marver H. Bernstein, The Job of the Federal Executive (1958, reprinted 1986). The special problem of the U.S. diplomatic service is the subject of a special enquiry presented in the Committee on Foreign Affairs Personnel, Personnel for the New Diplomacy: Report (1962). The relations between the civil service and Congress are studied in considerable depth in Joseph P. Harris, Congressional Control of Administration (1964, reprinted 1980). Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., Managing the Public's Business: The Job of the Government Executive (1981); Hugh Heclo, A Government of Strangers: Executive Politics in Washington (1977); and Herbert Kaufman, The Administrative Behavior of Federal Bureau Chiefs (1981), focus on the difficulties experienced by appointed executives in managing their agencies.General studies on the organization of executive power in former Communist countries include H. Gordon Skilling, The Governments of Communist East Europe (1966); and Ghita Ionescu, The Politics of the European Communist States (1967). A detailed study of the organization of authority in the former Soviet Union may be found in Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin (1969, originally published in French, 1967); this is contrasted with Chinese theory and practice in Donald W. Treadgold (ed.), Soviet and Chinese Communism: Similarities and Differences (1967). The internal organization and structure of government in China itself are discussed in Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, 2nd ed. (1968); and A. Doak Barnett, Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Communist China (1967). See also Harry Harding, Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy, 1949–1976 (1981).The special problems of civil services in new states are outlined in Kenneth Younger, The Public Service in New States: A Study in Some Trained Manpower Problems (1960, reprinted 1974); and in A.L. Adu, The Civil Service in New African States (1965), which can be compared with the same author's Civil Service in Commonwealth Africa: Development and Transition (1969). Interesting comparative, theoretical, and institutional studies on a broad front are found in Ralph Braibanti (ed.), Asian Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition (1966); John D. Montgomery and William J. Siffin (eds.), Approaches to Development: Politics, Administration and Change (1966); Ferrel Heady, Public Administration: Comparative Perspective, 3rd rev. ed. (1984); and Joseph La Palombara (ed.), Bureaucracy and Political Development, 2nd ed. (1963). Useful descriptions of the civil services of the European Communities and the United Nations can be found in Charles Debbasch (ed.), La Politique de choix des fonctionnaires dans les pays européens (1981). Brian Chapman Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges Edward C. Page

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