civil service

civil service, the body of government officials who are employed in civil occupations that are neither political nor judicial. In most countries the term refers to employees selected and promoted on the basis of a merit and seniority system, which may include examinations.

Appointment

In earlier times, when civil servants were part of the king’s household, they were literally the monarch’s personal servants. As the powers of monarchs and princes declined and as, in some countries, their sovereignty was denied them, appointment became a matter of personal choice by ministers and heads of departments. The influence senior civil servants may wield over policy and the need for them to work in close harmony with ministers induce all governments to insist on complete freedom of choice in appointments, even when, as in Great Britain, the freedom is rarely invoked. In some countries, notably the United States, senior advisers usually are replaced whenever a new administration takes office.

In Europe in the 19th century, appointment and promotion frequently depended on personal or political favour, but tenure was common in the lower and middle ranks once an appointment had been made.

Dependency on a superior’s favour led civil servants to ally themselves with liberal public opinion, which was critical of the waste and corruption involved in political patronage. Pressure for reform led to official formulations of basic qualifications for different posts; appointments and promotions boards were established within each department to prevent or obstruct overt political favouritism and nepotism; and salary scales were introduced for different grades to provide a civil servant with increments for good service while still holding the same post. In many countries civil service commissions were set up to ensure impartiality in selection procedures and to lay down broad principles for personnel management in the civil service. Recruitment in many European countries corresponded to the national educational systems: the highest class of civil servants entered service after graduation from a university, the executive class after full completion of secondary school, the clerical class after the intermediate school examination. The manual workers in the service were mainly recruited from persons of mature age who had left school after primary education or, in such countries as France and Germany, from military veterans. As public administration became more complex in the 20th century, specialized categories of civil servants were created to bring into the service doctors, scientists, architects, naval constructors, statisticians, lawyers, and so on. In several countries the establishment of these special classes caused some difficulties because their salary scales had to be linked with those of competing professional groups outside the service. The distinction between foreign service and home service personnel has sometimes caused difficulty because of inadequate liaison between overseas representatives and the makers of foreign policy at home. In the United States, the Rogers Act of 1924 unified the overseas service itself, but the civil servants of the State Department in Washington, D.C., continued to be regarded as part of the federal civil service.

The posts that fall under the rules of the U.S. merit system are not grouped into a small number of general classes but have individual job specifications and entry qualifications. Although designed to select entrants with special knowledge or skills for individual posts, this system has been criticized for failing to make the best use of the talent available to the government. In 1978 the Senior Executive Service was created to achieve more effective promotion and deployment.

All countries base appointments on some kind of competition. In some countries great emphasis is placed on formal written examinations supplemented by interviews. Such is the situation in France, where entry into the higher civil service is channeled through specialist schools, or grandes écoles, of which the École Nationale d’Administration and the École Polytechnique are the most important. In Great Britain, traditionally one of the great advocates of entry by formal examination, the Civil Service Commission relies more on informal tests and a series of interviews and observations and tends to measure the candidate’s intellectual competence by the quality of his university degree. The conventional written examination is dispensed with also in such European countries as Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Portugal, as well as the German Länder, or states. In the Länder the qualifications and references of all candidates are compared, whereupon the most eligible are interviewed by a departmental board. Candidates are expected to have completed a lengthy program of academic work for professional qualification and a period of subsequent training in a variety of public institutions under official supervision. If successful in their interviews, candidates are recommended to the minister, who makes appointments to higher grade posts, or to the heads of department, who handle the middle and lower categories. On the face of it, this method offers fewer guarantees of impartiality than does the formal written examination, but a civil service career is less attractive now than formerly and the civil service has to compete, usually at lower salaries, with business and the professions for the best available talent. In Sweden a constitutional provision requires that nearly all public documents (including the proceedings of authorities that make appointments) be open for public inspection, thus providing a check upon corruption or favouritism.

Most federal and culturally diverse countries try to ensure an equitable distribution of posts among their constituent elements. In Switzerland the federal authorities try to maintain a balance of posts not only between the cantons but also between the political parties, religions, and languages. The federal civil service in Germany draws on the public service officers in the Länder, and some degree of proportional representation is attempted. There was considerable pressure in Canada in the 1970s to ensure a more equitable distribution of federal civil service posts between the English- and French-speaking populations. It is also clear that many African states are compelled to recognize regional and tribal origins in their appointments to the civil service.