History

Early systems

Public administration has ancient origins. In antiquity the Egyptians and Greeks organized public affairs by office, and the principal officeholders were regarded as being principally responsible for administering justice, maintaining law and order, and providing plenty. The Romans developed a more sophisticated system under their empire, creating distinct administrative hierarchies for justice, military affairs, finance and taxation, foreign affairs, and internal affairs, each with its own principal officers of state. An elaborate administrative structure, later imitated by the Roman Catholic Church, covered the entire empire, with a hierarchy of officers reporting back through their superiors to the emperor. This sophisticated structure disappeared after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, but many of its practices continued in the Byzantine Empire in the east, where civil service rule was reflected in the pejorative use of the word Byzantinism.

Early European administrative structures developed from the royal households of the medieval period. Until the end of the 12th century official duties within the royal households were ill-defined, frequently with multiple holders of the same post. Exceptions were the better-defined positions of butler (responsible for the provision of wine), steward (responsible for feasting arrangements), chamberlain (often charged with receiving and paying out money kept in the royal sleeping chamber), and chancellor (usually a priest with responsibilities for writing and applying the seal in the monarch’s name). With the 13th century a separation began between the purely domestic functions of the royal household and the functions connected with governing the state. The older household posts tended to disappear, become sinecures, or decline in importance. The office of chancellor, which had always been concerned with matters of state, survived to become the most important link between the old court offices and modern ministries, and the development of the modern treasury or finance ministry can be traced back to the chamberlain’s office in the royal household.

From the middle of the 13th century three institutions began to emerge as the major bodies for handling affairs of state: the high court (evolving primarily from the chancellery), the exchequer, and the collegial royal council. In England and France, however, it was not until the early 14th century that such bodies emerged. In Brandenburg, which was governed by an elector (a prince with a right to elect the Holy Roman emperor) and which later formed the basis of the Prussian state, they became distinct entities only at the beginning of the 17th century.

Apart from justice and treasury departments, which originated in old court offices, modern ministerial structures in Europe developed out of the royal councils, which were powerful bodies of nobles appointed by the monarch. From the division of labour within these bodies the monarchs’ secretaries, initially given low status within a council, emerged as perhaps the first professional civil servants in Europe in the modern sense. The proximity of the secretaries to the monarch gave them more knowledge of royal intentions, and their relative permanence gave them greater expertise in particular matters of state than could be found among the more transient nobles on the council. They were also assisted by staffs. The secretaries grew in importance in the 15th and 16th centuries as they became more or less full members of the council.

The distribution of functions among secretaries was initially based upon geography. In England this geographical allocation—with, for example, a secretary of the North and a secretary of the South—persisted until 1782, when the offices of home and foreign secretary were created. In France a more complex allocation of territorial responsibilities among secretaries of state had begun to give way to functional responsibilities by the end of the ancien régime in 1789.

The civil service in China was undoubtedly the longest lasting in history; it was first organized, along with a centralized administration, during the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) and improved under the Tang (618–907) and Sung (960–1279). The administration was organized so well that the pattern stood until 1912. During the Sung dynasty there developed the full use of civil service examinations. Candidates were subjected to successive elimination through written tests on three levels, more than a hundred persons beginning the ordeal for each one who emerged successful. Although there was strong emphasis on the Chinese Classics (because knowledge of the Classics was thought to form the virtues of a good citizen), there was also an effort to devise objective and meaningful tests for practical qualities, and there were always long contentions over subject matter and testing methods. To preserve the anonymity of the candidate and to ensure fairness in grading, examination papers were copied by clerks, examinees were identified by number only, and three examiners read each paper. Higher officials were privileged to nominate junior relatives for admission to the bureaucracy, but the great stress on examination grades in promotion, the use of annual merit ratings, and the practice of recruiting many lower officials from the ranks of the clerical service ensured a considerable freedom of opportunity.

Modern developments