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Revised 16 December 1996
Revised 16 Dec. 1996
Their extended networks of interpersonal relationships within the bureaucracy, plus their wide-ranging experience gives them a capacity to coordinate public administration that can never be acquired by a crowd of "strangers" given temporary in-and-out posts at the top of the bureaucratic heap as described by (Heclo 1978). Improvised substitutes like the Senior Executive Service cannot possibly perform the functions of a genuine mandarinate, for reasons I have discussed more fully in (Riggs 1994, p.117). Tasks like coordinating drug control, health services, environmental policy, education, transportation and communications, etc. which cannot be solved by transients, including "czars," are much more easily handled in any state that has a developed mandarinate.
If so, you may think, why does the U.S. not also have a mandarinate? The answer is quite simple: with a government based on the separation of powers, it would be impossible to manage a mandarinate and keep it under control. Any mandarinate is intrinsically powerful. Any Office of the White House fully staffed by mandarins would easily dominate the President. Mandarins assigned to Congressional Committees could control their policies. A mandarinate is too powerful to be controlled by any separation-of-powers constitutional regime. The few 20th century examples promptly fell victims to bureaucratic domination -- e.g. South Korea and South Vietnam. By contrast, the countries under American military administration after World War II that were permitted to resume parliamentary governance -- Japan and Germany -- had mandarinates which the new regimes were able to control.
If we do not have a mandarinate, then what do we have? And what do other presidentialist (separation-of-power) regimes have? We all started with the traditional European system based on patronage. However, this word is too broad -- we still have patronage in the appointment of our top level transients but they are, indeed, transient (in-and-outers). By contrast, traditional patronage involved long-term appointments. This is what we had during the first 30 years or so of our existence until rotation in office was institutionalized by Andrew Jackson, as Leonard White has explained (1954, pp.5, 12-13). Actually, what we had until then is what almost all presidentialist regimes still have. It is hard for us to recognize or talk about the kind of bureaucratic system we had during our first decades because we lack a convenient term for the concept of patronage appointees who are able to keep their jobs indefinitely. The word, retainer, however, identifies such people very well, but we use it mainly for family retainers, or perhaps the officials in old-line monarchies. However, republics also have retainers, including the United States. Leonard White identified the phenomenon when he wrote of the patronage appointees from Washington's time up to Jackson's that "permanent and continued employment during good behavior was taken for granted" (White 1951, p.369). Remnants of the retainer system can still be found in the U.S., especially in many local governments.
Initially, retainers were non-threatening to presidentialist regimes. So long as the functions of government were relatively simple, they could easily be learned or improvised "on-the-job" and experience paid off so it was clearly expedient to retain "work horses" who could pull the barges of state. However, retainers, by definition, lack tenure and job security. In all 19th century presidentialist regimes they organized themselves informally to resist rotation -- perhaps they had noticed what Andrew Jackson did to their American counterparts. They never established trade unions, but they easily established informal organizations, cabals and cliques able to defend their interests.
Why, we may well ask, did such a fate not also strike the United States? There is a good answer that goes back to the Jacksonian revolution which, according to Leonard White, introduced "rotation into the federal system" although it did not introduce the spoils system (White 1954, pp. 4-5). Succeeding presidents became ever more corrupt and partisan in their appointments so that the abuse of power and public complaints mounted. However, transients are not, by definition, retainers. They lacked the time and motivation to organize themselves to seize power. Ultimately, Congress had to act and, after many failures it enacted the Pendleton Act in 1892. Although only an ordinary act of Congress, this act has had constitutional consequences (Van Riper 1958, p. 97). It introduced a new kind of bureaucrat, someone who was neither a mandarin nor a retainer -- someone evaluated by training and experience to occupy a particular position rather than join a life-long career system. Congressional responsiveness to local constituencies was also reflected in a provision of the Act that required the nation-wide distribution of appointments, a shrewd move that blocked the appointment of Ivy League graduates, the sons of affluent Easterners who could, indeed, have established a mandarinate.
Although the British mandarin model provided a starting point for this American legislation, it also generated a backlash that brought into existence a new kind of civil servant, what I refer to as a functionist. Interestingly, again, our lack of self-consciousness about this role is reflected in our lack of a term for it. The word "functionary" is often used in a pejorative sense to refer to a bureaucrat trapped by repeti"-
tive routines of office, but that is not what I have in mind. A "functionist", as I visualize the role, is a person who is able to focus h/er attention on specific functions of governance as a career.
Gradually, more and more posts in the American public services were staffed by functionists and, for the most part, American Public Administration schools and theories are dedicated to the training of future functionists and they focus their attention on the problems these career administrators will face. That excludes military officers, who already had well established training programs before the Pendleton Act and it also meant that basic policy areas -- agriculture, engineering, transportation, communications, health, education, etc. -- could not be a focus of Public Administration training because, simultaneously, professional schools in these areas emerged in all the state universities where, of course, the opportunity to train functionists as government employees was not overlooked.
In time, many functionists became professionals in the sense of this word intended by Wilson (1989). Their bureau-centric orientations combined with loyalty to the externally generated norms of professional associations and schools meant that they would not be interested in the formation of bureaucracy-wide informal organizations. It also meant that most functionists in government service did not identify themselves as bureaucrats or public administrators. After subtracting the main stream professions, what was left over for Public Administration was a bunch of staff services -- personnel, finance, public relations, organization and methods -- which became the bread and butter of our field. As ASPA has discovered, it is quite difficult, in this environment, to find many people who identify themselves with a "profession" of Public Administration -- the more attractive contexts are those of the main-line professions, or the sub-fields of the staff services.
Their external links of American functionists with professionals in the private sector permitted them to become non-partisan transients, entering and leaving government service in professional roles, including those of university professors. In sum, the development of a functionist bureaucracy enabled the American government to enjoy the services of increasingly specialized long-termers without taking the risk that they might form cabals to control or oust the government. This also meant that the quality of public administration could improve -- even though it remained highly uncoordinated. The risk of bureaucratic revolts was virtually eliminated: it's not one of the concerns discussed in text-books on Public Administration. Instead, we felt and hoped -- as did the schools and departments of Public Administration -- that we had some kind of universally relevant and valuable expertise that could be exported. If we succeeded, there would be more jobs and exotic travels for our graduates and we would also get more students from abroad, increasing the number of positions in our schools. All that powered the euphoria of the 60's.
It will not work and is, basically, unnecessary in parliamentarist regimes that are already in control of mandarin bureaucrats who can coordinate public administration more effectively than functionists can -- and they can easily add functionists as subordinates when they see the need for them. Our system will also be stoutly resisted by the retainers in other presidentialist regimes who readily see it as a fundamental attack on the prerogatives that enable them to survive in office and, if necessary, to seize power -- see (Ruffing-Hilliard 1991). The regimes that welcome our offers are often military dictatorships where it seems as though our technology might improve public administration without threatening the authoritarian status quo.
Today we are greatly concerned about democratization and political development -- this used to be a more purely intellectual pursuit but is now replacing administrative development as a focus of public policy. We don't enjoy helping dictators, especially when funding shortages mount and the cold war no longer justifies aid to anti-communist dictators. The basic reasons why parliamentary democracies and presidentialist republics see no great advantages for themselves in American Public Administration remain as real as they always were. I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong. But to prove that this analysis is in error, we need to know a lot more about ourselves. However, I think we can only understand ourselves in a truly comparative perspective, relying mainly on comparisons with other presidentialist regimes rather than with parliamentary systems -- my latest discussions of this question can be found in Riggs (1995b, 1996b, c, and d). No doubt we should have been studying ourselves comparatively when ASPA/CAG had the opportunity. But was it our fault that we didn't? I confess that I failed to see the point then but even if I had, I know we could never have secured the support for it that we needed. Perhaps someone else can find the strength and the resources to do so -- at least I hope so.
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Revised 16 December 1996
