New Political Governance in Westminster Systems: Impartial Public Administration and Management Performance at Risk gove_1569
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PETER AUCOIN* This article examines the phenomenon of increased political pressures on governments in four Westminster systems (Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand) derived from changes in mass media and communications, increased transparency, expanded audit, increased competition in the political marketplace, and political polarization in the electorate. These pressures raise the risk to impartial public administration administration and management performance to the extent that governments integrate governance and cam paigning, allow political staff to be a separate force in governance, politicize top public service posts, and expect public servants to be promiscuously partisan. The article concludes that New Zealand is best positioned to cope with these risks, in part because of its process for independently staffing its top public service posts. The article recommends this approach as well as the establishment of independently appointed management boards for public service departments and agencies to perform the governance of management function. A pu publ blic ic se serv rvice ice st staf affe fed d in inde depe pend nden entl tly y of mi mini nist ster erss on th thee ba basi siss of meri me ritt ha hass lo long ng be been en a ce cent ntra rall fe feaatu ture re of th thee Wes estm tmin inst ster er mo mode dell of public administration. This arrangement has always assumed two public interest outcomes that justify an override of the executive powers of the Editors’ Note. Note. Peter Aucoin, a distinguished professor of public administration at Dalhousie University and a member of the Governance editorial board, passed away in July 2011. A few months earlier, Peter had submitted the following article to Governance Governance.. We sent Peter two reviews and invited him to submit a revised version of his article. Unfortunately, Peter was not able to complete his revisions. As a tribute to our friend and colleague, and in light of the merits of the work, the editors have decided to publish Peter’s initial submission. The two reviewers review ers of tha thatt subm submissio ission—Jo n—Jona nathan than Bosto Boston n and John Neth Netherco ercote—ha te—have ve agr agreed eed to expand exp and their reviews into reflections on Peter’ Peter’ss manu manuscript script.. Peter Peter’s ’s collea colleague gue and collab collaboorator Mark D. Jarvis of the University of Victoria copyedited Peter’s text, but it should be noted that we have decided not to make any substantial changes to the initial manuscript. Readers should keep in mind that there might be statements in this article that Peter himself would have qualified or omitted if he had the opportunity to complete revisions in light of thee re th revi view ewer ers’ s’ co comm mmen ents ts.. Fu Furt rthe her, r, Pe Pete terr sa saw w th this is as th thee st star artt of an on ongo goin ing g re rese sear arch ch pr prog ogra ram. m. We do think, however, that the publication of this manuscript and the accompanying reflections is an appropriate tribute to Peter, whose career was distinguished by commitment to open dialogue on the great questions of contemporary governance. *Dalhousie *D alhousie University Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Institutions, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2012 (pp. 177–199). © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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democratically elected government. First, the public service is able to act impartially vis-à-vis citizens because it is not to be used as a partisan tool by the governme government nt of the da day—the y—the political party or parties in power. Public service positions are not to be awarded on the basis of partisanship or patronage; the public service is not to be directed or expected to act in ways that promote the partisan interests of the governing party or parties beyond what is required by their profession professional al duties. Second, the public service is able to provide advice to the government and to implement its program in an impartial manner because it is to be staffed on the basis of merit and is to use nonpartisan criteria as the basis for advice and administrative decisions. The public management reforms of New Public Management (NPM) that began three decades ago challenged the management performance of the public service. It sought to empower departmental managers in order to improve management performance by freeing them from centralized controls over the management of resources. These reforms also challenged the de facto independence of the public service from government and sought to assert ministerial direction and control as appropriate to ministers as government and executive heads of departments in the Westminster model. By empowering managers on the one hand and then asserting political control over them on the other, NPM reforms appeared contradictory (Aucoin 1990). This paradox is resolved by the theory that managers need greater management authority for management to secure desired outcomes that follow from more explicit policy and program direction from ministers, who in turn hold them to account for meeting their expectations (Aucoin and Heintzman 2000). Proponents argued that greater political control of policy and programs in the hands of the elected government was appropriate for democratic governance and that this did not undermine management with partisan-political interference in staffing or in the work of the public service that is meant to be impartial. Over Ov er th thee pas astt th thre reee de deca cade des, s, ho howe weve ver, r, th this is se seco cond nd ob obje ject ctiv ivee of NP NPM M ha hass transformed into a form of politicization that explicitly runs counter to the public service tradition of impartiality in the administration of public servic ser vices es and the non nonp part artis isan an man manag ageme ement nt of the pub public lic ser service vice.. This politicization I call New Political Governance Governance (NPG). I do so to distinguish it from the initial NPM efforts of political executives to control their public service bureaucracies and not be undermined or obstructed by them as in the “Yes, Minister” script. In contrast to legitimate democratic control of the public service by ministers, NPG constitutes a corrupt form of politicization to the extent that governments seek to use and misuse, even abuse, the public service in the administration of public resources and the conduct of public business to better secure their partisan advantage over their competitors (Campbell 2007). At best, this politicization constitutes sleazy governance; at worst, it is a form of political corruption that cannot but undermine imp impartiality artiality and, thereby thereby,, also mana management gement performance to the extent that it assumes management based on nonpartisan criteria.
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NPG is characterized by four main features: the integration of executive governance and the continuous campaign, partisan-political staff as a third force in governance and public administration, a personal politicization of appointments to the senior public service, and an assumption that public service loyalty to, and support for, the government means being promiscuously partisan for the government of the day. NPG constitutes an ideal type in the sense that the extent to which jurisdictions exhibit these features will vary over time according to the party in power, the prime minister, the state of competition between parties in the legislature and in the electorate, and, among other factors, the institutional and statutory constraints that provide checks against politicization. I examine this phenomenon by looking at the experiences of the four major Westminster systems of Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. The pressures contributing to NPG, as outlined below, are virtually the same everywhere, affecting all Western democracies. The consequences and responses vary, however. As discussed below, New Zealand, for instance, has essentially escaped the phenomenon of NPG, primarily because it has institutional features not found in the other three Westminster systems. I conclude by considering what might be done to better protect impartiality and management performance against the corrupting forces of NPG. Impartial Public Administration
Impartiality has two critical meanings: first, citizens be treated impartially in the administration of public affairs, and second, public servants not act in ways that advantage or disadvantage the partisan-political interests of any political party, including the governing party or parties. The latter means that, at a minimum, public servants not be a party to: • political influence in the staffing of the public service as a function of partisan patronage or cronyism; • patronage or pork-barreling in the award and distribution of government projects, grants, contribution, and contracts; • politicization of the content of public-service communications to the media and the public, including government advertising; or • positive or negative comments on matters of government policy or behavior to the media, legislative committees, or various attentive publics. It is the case, of course, that some such practices that would be judged partisan in some jurisdictions are accepted in other jurisdictions. It is also the case, however, that the standard of what is publicly expected—and acceptable—has risen over time in all four Westminster systems, even if contemporary declarations of public service values and ethics do not always reflect political realities.
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Since democracy is a contest between competing partisan sides, partisanship on the part of the public service necessarily diminishes adherence to fairness between these sides. Impartiality on the part of the public service is critical to both the “input” side of the political system—access to public authority—and the “output” side—the exercise of public authority (Rothstein and Teorell 2008, 169–170, 178–180). The application of the impartiality principle must establish clear lines between partisan politicians and political staff on the one hand and neutral public servants on the other. Of course, there will always be gray areas that need to be tolerated, created by differences of opinion as to what breaches any line that we attempt to draw. Nonetheless, whenever the gray area is permitted to span most of the continuum—between what is partial behavior and what is impartial behavior—the principle is invariably muted. If virtually “anything” gets to fall into the gray area, then, to all intents and purposes, the principle is discarded as a principle-in-action. Australia, Britain, and Canada have all had recent examples of the impartiality principle being washed out by weak or no responses from the public service leadership (in some cases because the culprits were themselves leaders). Management Reform
Since the early 1980s, public management reform has occurred in all of the four Westminster jurisdictions (Aucoin 1995). Management reform demanded “rolling back the state” (Hood 1991), reasserting political direction and control of the bureaucracy, and achieving greater economy and efficiency in the management of public resources. Pollitt’s (1990) early work on “managerialism” best captures the essence of this third dimension of management reform as NPM. The focus was on three aspects of management: (1) the devolution of management authority (“to let managers manage”), (2) the separation of policy and management responsibilities (to better clarify and specify what ministers wanted from managers by way of outputs), and (3) the institution of measures to hold managers to account for performance in producing the required outputs (“to make managers manage”). To the degree that NPM can be said to be a coherent model of public administrative reform, these were its three major foundations. The focus was on improved management performance. And, not surprisingly, this focus remains at the forefront. As Bouckaert and Halligan (2008, 1) declare, “long-term trends now appear to support the ascendancy of performance ideas as a dominant force in public management.” Streamlining central management agency government-wide controls, clarifying the responsibilities of public service executives for management and related operations, and enhancing the ways by which these executives are held to account are the principal NPM messages that have stuck. There were excesses that had to be corrected (Pollitt and Talbot 2004). Corrections produced some retreat, reversals, and rebalancing of the systems in questions (Halligan 2006). Nowhere, however, was there a wholesale
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rejection of NPM as public management reform, in theory or practice, and a return to traditional public administration, even if there necessarily emerged some tension between rhetoric and action, especially in New Zealand (Gregory 2006). The New Configuration of Political Pressures
Over the past three decades a set of pressures developed that changed the political environment for governments. In important respects, they are more challenging than the fiscal crises experienced by Western democracies in the 1970s and 1980s, as drastic as they appeared at the time. Because they are political in character, these pressures tempt governments to do whatever they deem necessary to stay in power (Roberts 2008). These pressures arise from the following developments. Masses of Media
Politicians now find themselves in an environment where the mass media (television, radio, the Internet, journals, and newspapers) are 24/7, aggressive, intrusive, combative, in several cases explicitly partisan, and catering to specialized and fragmented audiences. In the economic marketplace of the media, increased competition produces not only vigorous scrutiny of politics and government but also, and increasingly, tabloid journalism that is nasty, vile, or worse. Media management now requires virtual instantaneous response. The obvious temptation for governments is to treat media that are not on side politically as hostile forces to be managed with tactics that emulate the worst of the fourth estate themselves: gross misrepresentation, outright untruths, and the suppression of government information that should be publicly accessible according to the law. Not surprisingly, the Australian, British, and Canadian governments have become both highly centralized and highly politicized in their media management, an obsession of ministers and their political staff. As a result, the public service is under pressure to engage in media management, including government advertising, in ways that support the government and thus, at a minimum, put their impartiality, including the public’s perception of their impartiality, at serious risk. Transparency and Openness
“Freedom of information” (or public access to government information) regimes have been enacted in all the Westminster systems, although Britain only recently caught up with the others. Their utilization by the media and advocacy groups has had profound consequences, even where governments have struggled mightily to thwart the best efforts of those on the outside demanding access. More significant still, however, has been
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the cumulative effects of the information and communications revolution that have made even the most tightly controlled government operations at risk to leakage, intentional and otherwise. The major risk to impartiality from this group of pressures is the temptation of public servants to commit less to paper, to fail to keep appropriate records, and to participate in efforts to restrict what is made public. Experience confirms that a diminished adherence to formal procedures constitutes the space for unrecorded political interference, primarily by political staff, in what should be impartial processes of public policy implementation. Auditing the Performance of Government
There has also been a major proliferation in external audit and review agencies, coupled with an expansion in the mandates of many existing agencies. The pressures brought to bear by these agencies have been significant politically because they invariably possess a high degree of public legitimacy derived from their acceptance as impartial agents of good government. Even though the source of these pressures may be nonpartisan, they add to the increasingly turbulent political environment. Given their impartial and independent status, a government’s response to a critical assessment will not usually be a partisan attack, although the current Canadian Conservative government has attacked a number of independent agencies, illustrating the extent to which it sees all opposition or criticism as partisan in character. Media management of the reports of these agencies is the expected response from government. The pressures that apply to the public service as a consequence find their expression in the above noted political efforts to secure public service assistance in managing the media and in countering the negative assessments of audit and review agencies. Competition in the Political Marketplace
There has also been an explosion of organized interest groups, advocacy groups, lobbyists, and think tanks (partisan and independent, but increasingly the former). Political parties are still the primary political organizations insofar as they compete for and hold office, but they now share the very crowded political arena with a multiplicity of other political organizations. The political pressures on the public service are increased as ministers expect public servants to protect ministerial interests in their interactions with these groups and other opinion leaders, especially when conducted in open consultative forums. Governments expect what they regard as their public servants to promote their agenda in the conduct of their activities, notwithstanding the fact that a government’s agenda is necessarily a partisan agenda.
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It is one thing to impartially outline and explain a government’s policy. It is quite another to function as a government’s agent in promoting its agenda. To the extent that the public service is expected to communicate the government’s message in ways that advance or defend its merits, impartiality is undermined. Not surprisingly, the communications function of government has become the black hole of public service impartiality (Mulgan 2007).
Political Volatility and Polarization
The turbulent environment is further exacerbated by the combination of a decline of citizen deference and trust in political authority and a decline of partisanship in the citizenry. The combination produces a volatile electorate but also one in which there are fewer engaged citizens, including voters. Although this has not necessarily made partisan electoral contests more competitive, as evidenced by a number of recent long-serving governments in the Westminster systems considered here, it has meant a greater polarization along partisan lines, as parties pursue policy positions that elicit support primarily from their core supporters. Australia, Britain, and Canada have each recently experienced the collapse of the two major parties alternating as single-party majority governments. Partisan polarization poses a risk to impartiality insofar as it promotes a dualistic view of politics in which those who are not allies of the government must be its enemies. This perspective sends the political signal to public servants that they need not give priority to the public service value of impartiality as the government deems impartiality a fiction.
NPG to the Fore
In certain respects, of course, there is nothing new here. Political pressures have always borne down on the administration of public affairs in democratic government, based as it is on competing partisan sides with differing views on what should be done and how it should done. Politics and administration are thus uneasily aligned in the coupling of democratic government and nonpartisan public administration. It follows that the mere presence of pressures that pose a risk to the impartiality of the public service does not necessarily mean that the institution cannot cope with these pressures. It depends on the institutional strengths and defenses of the nonpartisan public service. The NPG, discussed below, constitutes a response to the pressures outlined above. It has several dimensions and, as expected, they are related. They are also relative in their development or expression in various political jurisdictions. And these responses wax and wane as the above noted political pressures, individually or collectively, intensify or lessen in their impact.
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Integrating Governance and Campaigning
The increased concentration of power in the office of the prime minister has become a defining feature in Australia, Britain, and Canada, even with variations across these systems. The concentration of power is largely seen as a negative development, especially by the media, focused on prime ministers who are viewed as control freaks, even bullies. Of recent prime ministers, Rudd, Brown, and Harper stand out in these regards. The fact that persons with these personal character traits are able not only to reach the top but to exercise power on their own terms is evidence of the weaknesses of the governmental and party structures to constrain the concentration of power. But it does not explain it as a political phenomenon. A more positive perspective is offered by those who argue that the complexities of modern governance not only encourage but even require a single focus of central direction and coordination. This is regarded as strategic government or a priorities and planning style of executive governance (Campbell 1988). And so the script goes, this can be provided only by a chief executive officer who stands alone at the apex of power. The collective leadership structure represented by cabinet government is seen as deficient for the purposes of strategic government. It cannot secure the desired degree of discipline, focus, and efficiency. This tendency to concentrate power under the prime minister has been evident in Australia, Britain, and Canada for some time. The prime minister is regarded as “the government,” with cabinet as a secondary, even marginal, institution of governance, whatever the formalities associated with its operation. Tony Blair’s account of the operation of his government and its cabinet, as the “ultimate decision maker” but not “the place where you do an in-depth discussion of policy,” leaves one knowing full well that cabinet did not count for much at all (Institute for Government 2010, 10)! In much the same way, Kevin Rudd’s dominance of his government enabled him to have a cabinet regime that ensured that ministers were not well informed in advance of cabinet business, could not be adequately advised by their own departments, and thus were required to decide in ways that ran counter to the well-established protocols of Australian cabinet government (Pearson 2010; Waterford 2008). These protocols had been so strong that John Howard did not abandon them until very late in his premiership. In Canada, the concentration of power has developed over time and is well documented (Savoie 1999, 2008). One survey of experts that covered the Canadian prime ministers from Pierre Trudeau to Jean Chrétien (1968–2003) placed prime ministerial influence in Canada ahead of all 22 other parliamentary democracies (O’Malley 2007). In 1999, Savoie went so far as to consider the Canadian cabinet to have evolved into nothing more than a “focus group” for the prime minister (1999). Under Stephen Harper, all accounts assert that prime ministerial power is even more concentrated (Martin 2010).
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The critical issue with respect to the concentration of power is whether power is exercised at the center in the cause of strategic government or in a manner that makes executive governance and continuous partisan campaigning a seamless undertaking (MacDermott 2008). In the former case, the concentration of power need not rule out a cabinet structure that governs, albeit in a highly centralized manner (Campbell 2007). In the latter case, cabinet government is replaced by a form of politicized governance that gives priority to partisan interests in all things and is dominated by the prime minister with an informal cabal containing her or his favorite political staff and perhaps a few trusted ministers and public servants. When politicized governance is in ascendancy, the concentration of power poses a serious risk to the impartiality of the nonpartisan public service. It is this politicized governance that has become more the norm than the exception in Australia, Britain, and Canada over the past two decades for all but routine government. The risk that comes with this concentration of power is that executive power unconstrained tends to be misused and abused to the partisan advantage of the governing party.1 And since ministers can rarely act alone in the implementation of decisions that entail administrative actions, the misuse and abuse of power invariably drags the nonpartisan public service into the partisan-political vortex. New Zealand’s recent experience stands out as different here, and its institutional evolution is important in this regard. Throughout most of the twentieth century, it experienced an extreme tradition of prime ministerial dominance to a degree found only in some Australian states and Canadian provinces. The adoption of a different electoral system that has produced coalition governments of various types with two or more parties securing ministerial posts as well as a new regime for appointing and managing the top public service posts that secures independence from prime ministerial control of these senior public servants has brought significant change in the position of the prime minister. With the constraints on prime ministerial power imposed by these new institutional factors, New Zealand became the system best able to cope with the pressures that elsewhere produce a concentration of power. And it has done so even with prime ministers, most notably Helen Clark, who undoubtedly would have wished to emulate prime ministers in the other three jurisdictions in being able to exercise greater executive and political power. Political Staff
The evolution of partisan-political staff as a critical part of executive governance and public administration has taken place over the past four decades. But it now has reached the point where the most trusted political staff of the prime minister can be as influential, or even more influential, as senior ministers or senior public servants. Political staff in the four Westminster systems vary greatly in number (Aucoin 2010; Eichbaum and
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Shaw 2010; Fawcett and Gay 2010; Maley 2010). The Australian and Canadian governments have political staff in the several hundreds (400 to 500 with some waxing and waning over time), Britain and New Zealand in the dozens (70 or so). In every case, a critical mass exists in the prime minister’s office. This state of affairs is not difficult to understand. Political management merges executive governance with continuous campaigning (Tiernan 2007). In this circumstance, it is not surprising that prime ministers are more likely to trust and respect the advice from political staff. Political staff are obviously useful to ministers, especially for the purposes of political management. They are also useful to the public service to the extent that they attend to matters of political management that are beyond the scope of a nonpartisan public service. In Britain, one of Blair’s cabinet secretaries, Andrew Turnbull, regarded the system as consisting of “ministers, special advisers [political staff], and [public service] officials . . . [as] three parts of a triangle, each with separate roles . . .” (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010, 219). The risk with political staff operating as a separate force in government is not primarily unaccountable behavior or too great an influence on ministers. Rather, it is that in promoting and protecting the government as the governing party, they all too easily regard the values of a nonpartisan public service and the distinct spheres of authority assigned to public servants as obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of effective political management. The continuous trashing of traditional public service values and structures in numerous quarters simply reinforces the perceptions of political managers that public servants will invariably stand in the way of a government implementing its agenda unless they can be co-opted as allies. Again, the major exception here is New Zealand (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010). Here political staff have been important for the same reasons as elsewhere—political policy advice and attention to the implementation of the government’s agenda—and, unique to New Zealand until the aftermath of the British 2010 election, as advisers in the formation of coalition governments and the negotiation of the coalition’s program. But, compared to elsewhere, they have been constrained by two important factors, and the risk to impartiality and management performance mitigated accordingly. First, they cannot roam freely throughout government, even as agents of the prime minister, since the prime minister is leader of a coalition government and not simply of the governing party. Second, the senior public service is staffed and managed independently of the prime minister, thus reducing, if not eliminating, the incentive of public servants to do the bidding of political staff in order to endear themselves to those who might influence the progress of their careers. A lengthy tenure of the British coalition formed after the 2010 election should be expected, other things being equal, to have the same general effects on the conduct of political staff, especially vis-à-vis public servants.
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Personal Politicization of Public Service
In the first phases of public management reform, prime ministers singled out the senior mandarins as the leadership of the bureaucracy for special attention. They wanted them to be politically responsive. In Britain, one of the first issues for Margaret Thatcher was her involvement in the appointment of permanent secretaries. Indeed, Thatcher’s engagement was key to the development of the concept of “personalization” (or “personal politicization”) of the staffing of the senior public service. She was not interested in appointing Tory partisans to these posts, but she did want people who were clearly onside the government’s agenda and who could get things done. Blair was equally impatient and attended to the appointment of permanent secretaries. In addition to giving permission for a handful of political staff to issue directives to public servants, he also appointed a number of nonpublic servants to public service posts in the Cabinet Office (Sausman and Locke 2004). In Australia, a public service board that enabled the mandarin class to all but appoint its own preferences was abolished in 1987, and the power to recommend departmental secretary appointments to the prime minister was given to the secretary of the department of the prime minister and cabinet (Podger 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Shergold 2007). Tenure disappeared as secretaries were placed on fixed-term contracts, with the prime minister deciding on performance. Despite consistent rhetoric that the tradition of a nonpartisan public service has been maintained throughout, prime ministers have continuously demonstrated that they are willing to dismiss secretaries or not renew their contracts; to bring people in from outside the Commonwealth public service, as both Howard and Rudd did with high-profile appointments, and again as both Howard and Rudd did, to appoint a new secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet following the change of government. In Canada, the prime minister appoints the top two ranks of the public service—deputy ministers and associate deputy ministers, a cadre of senior public service executives now number roughly six dozen. Prime ministerial attention to at least the most important of these posts is long-standing (Campbell and Szablowski 1979). In practice, the senior ranks of the Canadian public service remain almost exclusively the preserve of the career Canadian public service. External appointments to deputy minister positions are rare and even then usually not known partisans. Appointments are primarily decided on the recommendation of the prime minister’s own deputy minister, who is also the head of the public service and is advised by a committee of deputy ministers. In the three jurisdictions where these appointments are made by the prime minister, the key concern and risk for impartiality are the degree to which these appointees consider themselves personal agents of the prime
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minister with obligations (or at least career incentives) to do whatever needs to be done to protect and promote the interests of the prime minister, which at times are also partisan-political interests. When appointments are made by the prime minister there is the inevitable tendency for some public servants looking for promotions to be “excessively eager to please,” as Michael Keating (2003, 96), a former secretary to the department of the prime minister and cabinet in Australia, succinctly put it. Insiders in all three jurisdictions are well aware that some public servants do not make it to the top ranks at all, and some who do get there are later edged out by others for the very top positions, for reasons that go beyond merit. What is beyond merit is the political assessment of the candidates for these positions by the prime minister and her or his political staff. For example, former Canadian Prime Minister Chrétien (2007, 39) admitted that the power to make these appointments was needed as a form of political control lest “the elected government not be in charge of running anything.” He preferred to view his deputy ministers as “allies” of the ministry (Chrétien 2007, 37). When an independent commission examining the scandal that brought down the Liberal government of his successor recommended a more independent appointment process for deputy ministers (Canada 2006a), Chrétien’s view was echoed by a self-appointed group of establishment notables, including former ministers and deputy ministers, who claimed the commission’s recommendation to be flawed in political governance terms. They went so far as to portray deputy ministers as the prime minister’s “vice presidents”—the prime minister being viewed as the CEO of the government. The selection of these officials was deemed “too important a task to entrust to any kind of selection system detached from the political process” (Canada 2006b, emphasis added). According to this script, political factors should count in deciding who is and who is not appointed by the prime minister. Personal politicization is justified. The risk to impartiality is nowhere to be seen. By contrast, in New Zealand, the appointment of departmental chief executives (previously called permanent heads) was changed so that ministers could have some input into their selection rather than have them appointed independently by a commission, as was the case prior to 1988 (Boston 1994). As it transpired, however, the new process became the most independent in the Westminster systems, and is now viewed as meritorious precisely because it does secure independent staffing as well as independent management of the chief executive cadre (Gregory 2004). The mechanism is the State Services Commissioner who recommends a single candidate to the cabinet. There is a democratic safety valve in that cabinet can reject, and even appoint someone of its own choosing, although the rejection and the name of the person rejected must be made public. Other than one rejection years ago, the Commissioner’s recommendations have prevailed.
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The Public Service as Promiscuously Partisan
Prime ministers and their political advisors pay attention to who occupies the senior posts in the public service for the simple reason that the performance of the entire public service is important for the success of the government, in both governmental and political terms. But governments can also want their public service to be publicly supportive, even enthusiastic, about their agenda and to promote it in their consultations with stakeholders as well as in their delivery of services directly to the public. To the degree that governments have this expectation of enthusiastic support, it goes beyond the traditional requirement of loyalty to the government of the day. It substitutes partisan loyalty for impartial loyalty. The risk of politicization is enhanced by the fact that public servants, at various levels, are now much more exposed publicly in their dealings with stakeholders, organized interests, individual citizens, the media, and parliamentarians. The anonymity of public servants, as invisible to parliament or the public, disappeared some time ago. In the environment of NPG, moreover, ministers, sometimes explicitly, usually implicitly, expect those public servants who are seen and heard in countless public forums to support government policy, that is, to go beyond mere description and explanation. The expectation is not that they engage in the partisanpolitical process, for example, at elections or political rallies. Rather, it is that they be promiscuously or serially partisan, that is, to be the agents of the government of the day in relation to stakeholders, organized interests, citizens, media, and parliamentarians as they engage in consultations, service delivery, media communications, reporting to parliament, and appearing before parliamentary committees. Ministers recognize that much of this work can be conducted without becoming political. But when the public value of what the government is doing is disputed, they expect public servants to rise to the challenge. To the degree that ministers can expect public servants to do so without instruction, the culture is infested with the norm of promiscuous partisanship. The view that the public service can be promiscuously or serially partisan, by supporting government policy or actions, or partisan in some circumstances but not in others, is not unknown in the Westminster tradition (Mulgan 2008; Wilson 1991). The culture of promiscuous partisanship is nowhere articulated as the norm for the public service. Everywhere, impartiality remains the official doctrine. Indeed, if anything, it is asserted more often now as codes of conduct and values are proclaimed. Yet, breaches are commonplace. For instance, in Britain, the permanent secretary of the Treasury edits a book with a senior political staff person on the government’s economic policy that lauds the policy but only a few eyebrows are raised, and he is later promoted to the post of Cabinet Secretary. In Australia, an agency head appears in a partisan government advertisement promoting the government’s policy and is essentially excused by the Public Service
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Commissioner, much to the delight of the prime minister. In Canada, the public service leadership experiences a major scandal that clearly demonstrated the consequences of the public service acting promiscuously partisan up and down the hierarchy, but then portrays the scandal—a scandal that brought down the government—as an isolated incident occasioned by a few rogue bureaucrats. The typical response to these and other such instances of public servants crossing the line of impartiality in support of the government is to view the matter, as in the Canadian case above, as an aberration, or as in the British case, as simply part of the reality of modern public administration, or as in the Australian case, as belonging to that gray area between what is and what is not acceptable but where, in practice, the gray area is allowed to cover so much ground that virtually anything gets excused. In all these instances, a deep denial of there being anything systemic amiss characterizes the status quo. The Canadian scandal is especially instructive in this regard because it occurred over several years, included warnings to ministers from public servants at all levels including even from the very top, and yet, at the most critical times, the accommodative culture of promiscuous partisanship kicked in and public servants crossed the line. As a former dean of the retired deputy minister cadre put it: “It was clear what people at the political level wanted. They [public servants] got their marching orders and they marched.” To do otherwise would have been “quite foreign to the way we [the Canadian public service] function historically, which is to just do as you’re told” (Arthur Kroeger, quoted in Greenway 2004). Responding to NPG
There is no reason to assume that these NPG forces will abate in the near future because there is no reason to assume that the underlying pressures will abate. The challenge, then, is how to enhance and safeguard impartiality and management performance in the context of forces that inherently threaten politicization and, thereby, the risk of political corruption. The New Zealand case demonstrates the robustness of the institutional checks and balances that come from an electoral system that is unlikely to produce single-party majority government with the executive and prime ministerial dominance that comes with this outcome.2 Coalition governments are likely to enhance the role of cabinet and individual ministers in executive governance and thus constrain the prime minister, and to diminish the capacity of a prime minister’s political staff to act across government. In the major governing parties in New Zealand and Australia, the retention of the power of caucus to dismiss a prime minister also serves as a constraint on prime ministerial power (Weller 1994), even though it is an extreme measure. And reform initiatives to remove the unilateral powers of the prime minister or ministers to make appointments to a wide variety of quasi-independent or arm’s length executive,
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regulatory, or even parliamentary agencies, as are now well established in Britain (Flinders 2009), also diminish the powers of the prime minister. So too do measures to reduce the risk of political corruption in government work, such as in government advertising, a flourishing area of partisanship in some governments, including Australia and Canada. These various constraints on prime ministerial power reduce the risk of political corruption in the abuse and misuse of the public service. The two most important institutional changes involve the independent staffing of the top posts in the public service and the establishment of independent boards to perform the governance of management function in departments. The first is reasonably straightforward in that it builds on a tradition of independent staffing in all four systems, and New Zealand has had independent staffing of top posts in place for some time. The second would be a significant change, even though it would build on some recent developments, as noted below, developments that have not been widely known or as yet, with a few exceptions, well researched. The discussion of the second change requires considerably more space than the first change.
Independent Staffing for Public Service Impartiality
From the perspective of impartial public administration, the most important development in the historical evolution of the Westminster system was the adoption, over a century ago, of the ideal and practice of the independent staffing of the public service. Independent staffing, including appointments, promotions, and dismissal for cause, was and is meant to secure three objectives: first, the elimination of partisan-political influence in staffing the public service to remove any partisan abuse or misuse of public service staffing; second, staffing decisions based on merit so that the government and public are served by public servants qualified to perform the functions of public administration; and third, the protection of public servants from inappropriate partisan-political demands by political executives (or their political staff) so that public servants can act and be seen to act in a nonpartisan and impartial manner in carrying out their functions. The staffing of the top positions in the public service by the prime minister in Australia, Britain, and Canada, whatever the merits of the advisory process leading to these decisions and even with appointments coming from the career public service, now constitutes a serious exception to the normative structure of a nonpartisan public service (Aucoin 2006). This is especially the case since those appointed by the prime minister (i.e., Australian departmental secretaries, British permanent secretaries, and Canadian deputy ministers) now have the statutory or delegated authority to staff their departments, including, with some variations, the senior executives who are their immediate subordinates and their future successors.
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Establishing an independent structure for staffing (and managing) the top ranks of the public service would not be unique in the Westminster systems. As noted, New Zealand has created a process that does just this, subject to an override by the government that represents a reasonable democratic safety value for use in extreme circumstances. Independent staffing, as noted above, must encompass more than initial appointment. It could encompass both open competition for appointments or appointments from within the public service, with or without competition. The independent staffing authority should also be given authority for managing the senior executive cadre as a corporate resource of the public service. In this regard, it could also be linked to a new system for the governance of management at the departmental/agency level so that the promotion of management performance entails more than exhortation and oversight by central corporate-management agencies. Departmental Boards for the Governance of Management
Having a nonpartisan public service independently staffed on the basis of merit should promote impartial public administration and management performance. This should especially be the case if the very top positions are encompassed by this system. However, management performance requires more than having the very best managers rise to the top. It also provides the checks and balances on how they exercise their powers; in short, a robust “governance of management” regime is also required. There are four structures now in use in the Westminster systems for the governance of management. First, and everywhere, there is the continued use of central management agencies to govern the functions of management, including especially the management of human and financial resources. Over the past three decades, the streamlining of long-standing central agency controls over departmental management has occurred (Bakvis and Juillet 2004) as well as some significant devolution of management authority to department public service heads. Gone are most, but not all, centrally imposed standardized, government-wide, one-size-fits-all regulations. With this streamlining, the capacity of central agencies to use simple compliance with rules as the major form for the governance of management diminishes significantly. However, the devolution of greater management authority to departmental managers was accompanied by the demand for a greater measure of accountability for management performance on the part of these departmental managers (Aucoin and Jarvis 2005). Responsibility within government for holding empowered department heads to account was everywhere assumed to still be the task of the central management agencies. The various performance management regimes for holding public service management to account, and for promoting improved performance, have served some useful purposes, especially where performance can be measured quantitatively and checklists of
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expected performance can be used. However, the constant revision of these systems, again everywhere, demonstrates that their utility should not be exaggerated. What the record makes clear is that central agencies alone cannot adequately perform the governance of management function in governments where departments have devolved significant management authority and have then developed their own management policies and practices to fit their particular lines of public business. Central agencies have neither the capacity nor the time to do more than standardized assessments. Something more is required. The second approach is a form of self-governance of management whereby the governance of management and the practice of management are merged into one structure. The Australian and British governments have adopted this approach as a public sector emulation of the corporate governance movement in the private sector. Under this model, the departmental management hierarchy functions as a governance board, chaired by the department secretary/permanent secretary, who, of course, is also the chief public service executive of the department. In Britain, the Treasury adopted a code for the corporate governance of ministerial departments (HM Treasury, July 2005). The code, in place from 2005 to 2010 (when it was revised to accommodate a different structure, as outlined below), required each department to establish a “board” that included at least two “independent non-executive members to ensure that executive members [the department’s senior management] are supported and constructively challenged in their role” (HM Treasury, 2005, 11). The independent nonexecutive members were appointed by the permanent secretary, with the consent of the minister. These departmental boards are essentially the senior management of the department sitting as a collective body. However, two aspects of these boards distinguished them from the traditional governance of the department (Wilks 2007, 450–451). First, there was “the stress of collective board responsibility,” as opposed to the individual responsibilities of each member of the senior management and their respective relationships in what was clearly a departmental hierarchy of positions. Second, there was the emphasis on “the independence” of the nonexecutive members (one of whom should ideally chair the departmental audit committee). These boards were to function as a corporate body, and some of the members— the independent nonexecutive members—had special responsibilities for challenging the executive members, that is, the departmental managers. The role and influence of these boards varied, in part because they were viewed within government as something of an experiment, an innovation in the making, if only because the idea of an advisory board having governance functions is a circle not quite squared (Parker et al. 2010). In Australia, there are no independent, nonexecutive members. As in Britain, the boards are meant to be regarded as having collective responsibilities but, also as in Britain, have no separate authority; they are merely advisory to the department secretary. The self-governance model is one
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that can be found in the private sector, where in some corporations the board of a corporation is dominated by executive members, and with the chief executive officer also the chair of the board (although a corporate board would have separate formal collective authority). The relative absence of checks and balances on the executive members gives the model low scores from corporate governance experts. On this criterion, Australia gets very low scores (and, it might be noted, there was nothing to indicate any change in the Rudd government’s 2010 “blueprint for the reform of Australian government administration”) (Australia 2010). At best, the collective character of the board introduces peer pressures to promote management performance. The third approach is the one taken by the British Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government formed after the 2010 election based on the Conservatives’ election campaign promises. This path moves away from the governance of management as represented, however awkwardly, in the Treasury corporate governance model (Wilks 2007) toward an integration of the governance of policy and management. The new structure thus entails a board for each department that is chaired by the secretary of state, the senior minister of the department. The composition must include two to four other ministers, three to four nonexecutive members (the majority from the commercial private sector with experience in managing large organizations) who are to be appointed by the secretary of state, and three of four senior departmental executives, including the permanent secretary and the finance director. The assertion of political control is clear in this model, with the secretary of state as chair, other ministers on the board, and the nonexecutive directors being the appointees of the secretary of state. Together they clearly dominate the board, although the board is merely advisory to the secretary of state. This plan, announced well before the election by Francis Maude, then the Conservative shadow minister and now the sponsoring minister, raised considerable concern in various civil service circles at the time. The proposed scheme gave every indication that management would be sucked into the political vortex. In addition to ministers and their political staff, departmental civil servants now have to confront yet another cadre of ministerial political appointees whom civil servants might be forgiven for not seeing as independent of their ministers.3 Equally important, with no distinction established between governance and management, it is not at all clear how a minority of nonexecutive directors “will galvanise departmental boards as forums where political and official leadership is brought together to drive up performance” (Cabinet Office, United Kingdom 2010). The fourth model is provided by a lone Canadian government department. In this case, the department structure contains a department board exclusively for the governance of management. The model combines an independent board for the governance of management with the traditional structure of ministerial responsibility for departmental policy
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and programs. The department is the Canadian government’s revenue department—the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), as it is called.4 The CRA can be considered a new form of ministerial department (Brown 2009). The traditional departmental powers of the minister over policy and programs are undisturbed, and the minister is served by a public service department, headed by a deputy minister who remains the minister’s public service policy adviser in the traditional mode. But there is also a board of management to govern the management of the department, and this board is almost entirely independent of the departmental executive management team. The board is established by statute, and its statutory responsibilities for management are defined therein. The board is a governance board in these respects and not merely an advisory body. One of its functions is to advise the deputy minister, but the board also must approve the management policies and systems of the department. The board may also give advice to the minister. The key elements of this design are the de facto independent staffing of the board (the result of an accidental development5), a board composition where all members but the deputy minister are nonexecutive members, a nonexecutive member appointed as chair, and the legislative assignment of significant management authorities to the board that give the board sufficient powers to direct, control, and oversee the management performance of the deputy minister and department. The minister possesses a power to issue directives on any subject that falls within the board’s authority, but any such directives must be publicly proclaimed and tabled in Parliament. The CRA board has been given high marks for its effect on management performance and for insulating the agency management from potential political influence over what should be management matters (Canada, Canada Revenue Agency 2005; Plumptre 2007). Nonetheless, this unique Canadian model has not been emulated in the Canadian government, although it has been proposed for the federal police force, which has experienced a number of major management debacles, even scandals, over the past decade. It is not surprising that there is little enthusiastic support for independent management boards in government departments among senior public servants. Except for annual or periodic central agency reviews and audits from parliamentary agencies, departmental administrative heads are otherwise free from any ongoing oversight of their management performance. Ministers intervene occasionally, appropriately, or otherwise, but that does not usually take the form of continuous oversight for the purposes of evaluation of management performance. In short, departmental public service executives find themselves in a situation where they both govern management and are management, where the department head (as CEO) is also the chair of the management board and the board is essentially advisory to the department head, and where there are no independent nonexecutive board members.
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The utility of well-designed boards for governing management should come as no surprise. Performance management can never be based entirely on performance measurement (Aucoin and Jarvis 2005; Bouckaert and Halligan 2008). It requires the exercise of judgment, based on expertise and experience, brought to an ongoing dialogue that includes those with the authority to govern management and those with the authority to manage. Ministers cannot perform this function, however they are advised. Nor can central corporate-management agencies. Ministers and central agencies have functions to perform in these regards, but they need dedicated and independent structures to conduct performance management as the governance of management. The success of the board in promoting performance, through its powers as well as the independence of its board members, conforms to the findings of agency boards in the Netherlands, albeit for the boards of arm’s length agencies rather than for the boards of a ministerial department (Bovens, Schillemans, and ’t Hart 2008). Conclusion
NPG has exposed the leadership of the public service to the vagaries of the partisan-politics process not only inside the executive government arena but also in the public forums of Parliament, public consultations, and the media. The forces that underpin NPG are not merely transient. But the effects of NPG can be tempered by institutional changes to the public service as an institution of executive government that is meant to be nonpartisan, act impartially, provide quality public service to ministers and citizens, and be accountable for its management and administrative performance. Aside from changes to the political institutions of government, the most crucial of these changes are that its leadership become part of the public service, in law, by being staffed independently and that the management performance of its senior executives be independently governed and held accountable within the executive arena of government at the level of each department. Notes 1. An explicit acknowledgment of this pattern is provided by a former chief of staff to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper who candidly discusses two major instances (Geddes 2009). 2. The Australian prime minister and government have also been constrained in recent decades by the absence of a government majority in the Senate. 3. The Institute for Government issued a report on the subject of government boards before the election that recommended there be a strategic board headed by the minister and a management board headed by the permanent secretary (Parker et al. 2010). 4. The department is called an agency but ought not be considered part of the agencification phenomenon most commonly associated with the Executive Agency design in Britain.
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5. The accident occurred as a result of a proposed design of the revenue department as an independent national tax corporation that would have involved both the federal and provincial governments. When this idea was shelved the planning was sufficiently advanced so that the appointment process for what would have been a board of directors was retained. This meant that 11 of the 15 directors are essentially appointed by the provincial and territorial governments independently of the federal government.
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