A Topography of Civil Service Laws

ABSTRACT

We offer a comparative study of the differences in civil service laws across countries in order to observe how these systems relate to one another. We compare the civil service laws of 26 countries from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and eight non-OECD countries from Central and Eastern Europe to identify how different configurations of civil service systems are revealed through their shared attributes. Our data are drawn from the contents of civil service legislation and the status of those civil servants covered by the civil service laws of these countries. We use cluster analysis to identify several groups of countries whose civil service systems share similar features. We find that the estimated topography, or similarity among systems, depends on both subjective decisions about the number of groups and the variables used to estimate the space. However, we draw key conclusions about the value of certain cases, like the United States, for learning about other systems, and the need for expanded knowledge of systems from Central and Eastern Europe.

Notes

Note: New Zealand, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic were excluded from our data because they are exceptional cases. In New Zealand and the Czech Republic, all the public employees are under the general labor law, while Switzerland recently removed the tenure rights and salary schemes for civil servants and introduced public law contracts and collective agreements to govern the relationship between civil servants and the state (Synnerstrom, Lalazarian, and Manning 2001; Francisco 2000).

SIGMA is mainly financed by EC/PHARE. PHARE was financed by the European Union to help CEE countries preparing to join the European Union. The OECD and several OECD Member countries also provide resources. SIGMA assists public administration reform efforts in CEE (OECD 1996a; 1996b).

Twenty countries originally signed the Convention on the OECD in 1960; currently 30 countries are members. We note the uniqueness of this subsample: members of the OECD share a commitment to democratic government and the market economy. Yet this subsample represents an important group of countries in the world economy—and in setting goals for developing countries. Its members produce 60% of the world's goods and services; non-members are invited to subscribe to OECD agreements and treaties; the organization shares expertise and exchanges views on topics of mutual concern with more than 70 countries worldwide, including Brazil, China, Russia, and least developed countries in Africa (OECD 2006). Of course, the OECD is largely a mixture of European and North American countries, although it also includes a few countries from Asia.

The OECD produces rules, decisions, and recommendations in areas where multilateral agreement is required for individual member countries to make progress in a global economy. OECD countries share the benefits of growth with each other by monitoring and analyzing economic growth and identifying factors, institutions, and policies that enhance the growth. Peer pressure can act as a powerful incentive to improve policy and implement “soft law”—non-binding instruments such as the OECD Corporate Governance Principles—and can on occasion lead to formal agreements or treaties (OECD 2006).

The data are from http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/cs_law_OECD.htm, prepared by Staffan Synnerstrom (SIGMA), Kathy Lalazarian and Nick Manning, with Neil Parison and Jeffrey Rinne (World Bank) and submitted in 2001. The underlying data are from OECD SIGMA; it also includes other information from the Department for Government, Labour Law & Administration (GLLAD/ILO).

See the discussion at http://go.worldbank.org/XCBKWAKZ20

The cognitive approach is similar to the inductive approach but relies on the perceptions of researchers or expert informants of the data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sungjoo Choi

Sungjoo Choi ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor of Public Administration in the Department of Political Science and International Affairs at Kennesaw State University. Her research interests include managing diversity in government, gender issues, and organizational behavior of public employees. She has published articles in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, and American Review of Public Administration.

Andrew B. Whitford

Andrew B. Whitford is Professor of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. His research on bureaucratic politics, political economy, and research methodology has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science. His book Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda: Constructing the War on Drugs, coauthored with Jeff Yates, was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009.