The Prague Post Online: Opinion: Civilized dysfunction

October 14th, 2008

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Civilized dysfunction

Public servants need to disentangle their priorities from those of politicians and get organized
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August 15th, 2007 issue

By Edvard Outrata

In mature democracies, those who work as civil servants are professionals, not politicians. In addition, those countries’ branches of civil service are bound together by a common ethos and a central framework.

Our civil service isn’t professional — it is highly politicized and is not centrally managed.

Just who runs the state?

Politicians are on one side — those who try to transform the wishes and needs of citizens into programs, who find support for these programs, and who communicate with the general public. Politicians learn how to do their jobs in the political arena.

Civil servants are on the other side — specialists in many disciplines who can help the state apparatus function. They have prior academic and on-the-job training.

The roles of politicians and civil servants, and how close they are to each other, are becoming clear to most Czechs. The once popular and naive notion that a government could best be created by apolitical “experts” has largely been disproved.

Politicians don’t make for good civil servants and civil servants don’t make for good politicians.

So, understanding their differences is crucial. The notion that a politician or political party controls all political and state power upon winning an election is a misconception. According to this view, the law is the only restraint on absolute control of the executive, legislature and judiciary.

This perception, common in newly forming democracies (and continued in other democracies well into the 20th century and beyond) ignores the complexity of decision-making in a modern nation. Civil servants as an entity must be separate from politicians or any other profession to be able to run the complex state apparatus.

Political loyalty, not expertise

In this paradigm, professionalism means being able to implement a prescribed political program, regardless of its content.

Needing required expertise to run the government is largely ignored by Czech politicians. Instead, we function similar to how the democratic world did 50 or 100 years ago. That means the civil service is mostly decentralized.

Ministries act independently and usually in ways that are not compatible with neighboring ministries. Individual ministries are large and complex organizations, and politicians often fill key posts around them according to their whims.

The result: complete politicization and complete devastation of the professional managerial staff.

Politicization goes further. Should state officials in lower positions wish to seek higher employment, they don’t dare remain apolitical, since that automatically spells an end to their career prospects. They have to either choose a particular party, join a particular clique of people, or leave. Thus “natural” selection and promotion of qualified and competent staff are replaced by a system that rewards opportunists, careerists or sheep.

This process makes its way to the lower levels of the government structure. In the end, civil servants survive best by sticking to a routine and avoiding rocking the boat in any way.

Problems go deeper still. Good government managers have experience. But the aforementioned selection process prevents such managers from taking root in the government. Though there are exceptions, most such people manage to remain within the sector thanks to unique strategic talents.

Civil service is the key sector that has not changed since the revolution. In the meantime, an entire generation of bureaucrats and politicians has grown up unable to imagine any other work system.

Politicians should change; civil servants should not.

During the 20th century, all democratic states created civil service systems; hence there are many recipes to change the current situation.

Changes should start with these key steps: First, the public sector must be separated into political and administrative areas. Politicians should come and go (via the electorate or political appointments), but administrators should be apolitical specialists.

What that means is that politicians should not have a say in who works for civil servant managers. Only then can the civil service improve its functionality independently of the political whims or characters of the day. Work performance can then be based on competence rather than political affiliation.

Self-deception

In 2002, Parliament passed a new Civil Service Act, which addressed many of these issues. But it wasn’t put into practice. We deceived the European Union, because it insisted that such laws be passed before entry was approved. Now that we are in the EU, no one bothers to check up.

But we also deceived ourselves. We remain the only civilized democracy that has such a primitive civil service organization. It is a system that remains open to abuse, lack of professionalism, politicization, incompetence and even corruption. Unfortunately, even today, all of the major political parties in this country — including the ones allegedly opposed to corruption, simply continue to push the issue aside.

— The author is a former independent Czech senator. This editorial originally ran in a longer version in The New Presence. It has been edited for space reasons.

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