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
Prussia
The foundations of modern public administration in Europe were laid in Prussia in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The electors of Brandenburg (who from 1701 were the kings of Prussia) considered a rigidly centralized government a means of ensuring stability and furthering dynastic objectives. Their principal effort was devoted in the first instance to the suppression of the autonomy of the cities and to the elimination of the feudal privileges of the aristocracy. Civil servants were therefore appointed by the central government to administer the provinces, where the management of crown lands and the organization of the military system were combined in a Kriegs-und-Domänen-kammer (“Office of War and Crown Lands”). Subordinate to these offices were the Steuerräte (“tax councillors”), who controlled the administration of the municipalities and communes. These officials were all appointed by the central government and were responsible to it. At the apex of the new machinery of government was the sovereign.
This centralized system was strengthened by creating a special corps of civil servants. In the beginning these civil servants—in a real sense servants of the crown—were sent out from Berlin to deal with such purely military matters as recruiting, billeting, and victualing the troops, but in the course of time they extended their supervision to civil matters as well. By 1713 there were clearly recognizable administrative units dealing in civil affairs and staffed by crown civil servants.
Special ordinances in 1722 and 1748 regulated recruitment to the civil service. Senior officials were required to propose to the king the names of candidates suitable for appointment to the higher posts, while the adjutant general proposed noncommissioned officers suitable for subordinate administrative posts. Further steps were taken throughout the 18th century to regularize the system of recruitment, promotion, and internal organization. All of these matters were brought together in a single General Code promulgated in 1794. The merit system of appointment covered all types of posts, and the general principle laid down was that “special laws and instructions determine the appointing authority to different civil service rank, their qualifications, and the preliminary examinations required from different branches and different ranks.” Entry to the higher civil service required a university degree in cameralistics, which, though strictly speaking the science of public finance, included also the study of administrative law, police administration, estate management, and agricultural economics. After the degree course, candidates for the higher civil service spent a further period of supervised practical training in various branches of the administration, at the end of which they underwent a further oral and written examination. The basic principles of modern civil services are to be found in this General Code.
France
A fundamental change in the status of the civil servant came about as a result of the French Revolution of 1789. The fall of the ancien régime and the creation of a republic meant that the civil servant was seen as the servant no longer of the king but rather of the state—even though rule by a king or emperor was soon brought back and continued in France for nearly another century. The civil servant became an instrument of public power, not the agent of a person. This depersonalization of the state encouraged a rapid growth in the field of public law concerned with the organization, duties, and rights of “the public power,” of which civil servants were the principal component. To the ordered structure of the Prussian bureaucracy there began to be added the logical development of administrative law.
This bureaucratization was greatly fostered by Napoleon I, who built up a new civil service marked not only by some of the features of military organization but also by the principles of rationality, logic, and universality that were the inheritance of the Enlightenment. There was a clear chain of command and a firmly established hierarchy of officials, with duties clearly apportioned between authorities. Authority was depersonalized and went to the office and not the official—although Napoleon insisted that each official should be responsible for action taken in the name of his office. France was divided into new territorial units: départements, arrondissements, and communes. In each of these, state civil servants had a general responsibility for maintaining public order, health, and morality. They were all linked in a chain to the national Ministry of the Interior. A special school, the École Polytechnique, was set up to provide the state with technical specialists in both the military and the civil fields—particularly in general administration. In the field of general administration, the Conseil d’État (“Council of State”), descended from the old Conseil du Roi (“Council of the King”), imposed an intellectual as well as a judicial authority over the rest of the civil service; as the first major European administrative court, it became the creator of a new type of administrative jurisprudence. The prestige of the new French administrative organization and the logical arrangement of its internal structure prompted many other European countries to copy its principal features. And the expansion of the French Empire spread many of its features across the world.
In France under the Third Republic (1870–1940) there developed, however, considerable political interference in some branches of the civil service; and much of its vitality was diminished as its bureaucratic practices tended to become unwieldy and its personnel lethargic. Not until 1946 was the system reformed—which involved overhauling the administrative structure of the central government, centralizing personnel selection, creating a special ministry for civil service affairs, and setting up a special school, the École National d’Administration, for the training of senior civil servants. This school in particular has attracted worldwide attention for its ability to instill in its graduates both specialist and generalist skills.
The British Empire
The first attempts by Great Britain to create efficient administrative machinery arose from its commitment to govern India and to avoid in that country the periodic scandals that marked some of the rule of the East India Company. Robert Clive, appointed governor of Bengal for the second time in 1764, introduced a code of practice that prohibited servants of the company from trading on their own account or accepting gifts from native traders. Subsequent governors strengthened the ban, compensating for the loss of benefits by substantially increasing salaries, introducing promotion by seniority, and reorganizing the higher echelons of administration. Recruitment was carried on by the company in London, and after 1813 entrants to the civil service had to study the history, language, and laws of India for a period of four terms at Haileybury College, England, and to obtain a certificate of good conduct before taking up their posts. As a result of advocacy by Thomas Macaulay, secretary to the board of control, examination rather than patronage was adopted as a recruitment method. New rules from 1833 stipulated that four candidates had to be nominated for each vacancy and that they were to compete with one another in “an examination in such branches of knowledge and by such examinations as the Board of the Company shall direct.”
There was further criticism of the way India was run, however, and in 1853 another legislative reform of the administration was proposed. The experience of the Indian Civil Service influenced the foundation of the modern civil service in the United Kingdom. A report was published in 1854 on the organization of the Permanent Civil Service in Britain. Its principal author, Sir Charles Trevelyan, had acquired a reputation for searching out corruption in the Indian Civil Service during 14 years of service there. The report of 1854 recommended the abolition of patronage and recruitment by open competitive examination. It further recommended (1) the establishment of an autonomous semijudicial body of civil service commissioners to ensure the proper administration of recruitment to official posts, (2) the division of the work of the civil service into intellectual and routine work, the two sets of offices to have separate forms of recruitment, and (3) the selection of higher civil servants more decidedly on the basis of general intellectual attainment than specialized knowledge. The Civil Service Commission was established in 1855, and during the next 30 years patronage was gradually eliminated. The two original classes were increased to four, and some specialized branches were amalgamated to become the Scientific Civil Service. The new civil service managed to attract to its senior levels highly capable, discreet, and self-effacing university graduates. Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge became—and remain to the present—especially prominent in the ranks of senior civil servants in Britain.
The United States
In the United States patronage remained the norm for considerably longer than in Britain. From the early days of the federation two principles were firmly held. First, there was antipathy to the notion of a cadre of permanent civil servants; President Jackson clearly dismissed this notion of a highly professional caste when he said, in 1829, that “the duties of all public officers are . . . so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” As a consequence, he said, “I can not but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience. No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” The second principle—that as far as possible public office should be elective—followed more or less automatically. But because this principle could not be practically applied to the subordinate levels of administration, there developed the “spoils system,” in which public office became a perquisite of political victory, being widely used to reward political support. This system was susceptible to persistent, blatant, and ultimately unacceptable degrees of inefficiency, corruption, and partisanship. These particular faults were strongly felt after the Civil War (1861–65), during the period of rapid economic and social development. Under considerable pressure, the federal government accepted a restricted principle of entry by competitive open examination, and in 1883 the U.S. Civil Service Commission was established to control entry to office in the federal service. The work of the commission was mainly restricted to the lower grades of employment, and it was not until the first 20 years of the 20th century that the merit system of recruitment was expanded to cover half the posts in the federal service. After that period the commission’s control gradually increased, mainly over the lower, middle, and managerial offices in the federal service. After 1978 the functions of the commission were divided between the Office of Personnel Management and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Principal policy-making posts remain outside the jurisdiction of these two bodies, being filled instead by presidential nomination.
The development of civil service in U.S. local government varied among states, counties, and cities. The adoption of a merit system can usually be dated from the early 20th century, during the reform period of the muckrakers. In some states the merit system became well established, with a central personnel office that included a civil service commission or board similar to the federal model. At the other extreme there was simply a central personnel office headed by a single personnel director with no advisory board. At the municipal level, by the mid-20th century, most large cities in the United States had developed some sort of merit system; in smaller cities, however, merit systems were correspondingly less common. In the counties, the majority of which were rural and had relatively few public employees, formally established merit systems were rare.
