Civil Service Commission
Civil service is the entire body of those employed in the civil administration as distinct from the military and excluding elected officials (Marlow-Ferguson, 2002). And in this modern civil service, personnel are usually chosen by examination and promoted on the basis of merit ratings. According to Lee (1993), to keep pace with the trend toward a stronger and wider scope of administrative authority, quantitative and qualitative changes in public administration, in the areas of specialization, technology, and efficiency, governments seek more specialized civil servants to satisfy the idea of “government is best when it serves most.” In democratic nation’s recruitment and advancement procedures are designed to divorce the civil service from political patronage.
Developing political democracy depends on how well the executive and legislative branches can separate and coordinate their respective functions with the other; how well the legislature can perform its mandated inspections and, at the same time, maintain the balance of separation and coordination; and how well the legislature controls the diverse functions of the civil service system (Gerth and Wright Mills 1958).
Civil service commission plays significant role. In the city, the role of the civil service commission is to advise the Mayor and the Personnel Director on problems concerning personnel administration in city service and to uphold the interest of the city’s merit-based civil service system, a role which is vital to the public interest (Krislov and Rosenbloom, 1981). The primary chores of the commission are to serve as an appellate tribunal for employee appeals; to rule on proposed changes to the civil service regulations and the classification and pay plans; and to rule on requests for exemptions from civil service and waivers of the residency requirement.
But then, the selection of civil administrators and staff on the basis of merit examinations is a late development in the West. The Roman Empire seems to have recruited and promoted officials largely on the basis of custom and the judgement of superiors despite important contributions to administrative structure and procedure.
There are historic movements that prompted changes in civil service. Accordingly, the establishment of the modern civil service is closely associated with the decline of feudalism and the growth of national autocratic states (Appleby, 1952). In Prussia, as early as the mid-17th cent., Frederick William, elector of Brandenburg, created an efficient civil administration staffed by civil servants chosen on a competitive basis. In France similar reforms preceded the Revolution, and they were the basis for the Napoleonic reforms that transformed the royal service into the civil service. Development of a professional civil service came several decades later. What’s more, the killing of President Garfield in 1881 by a disappointed office seeker precipitated the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, re-establishing the Civil Service Commission after a nine-year lapse. The commission draws up the rules governing examinations for those positions that Congress places in the classified civil service. All Presidents since Cleveland have expanded the classified list, and the great majority of federal employees during peacetime are now classified. In addition to this, in 1939 the merit system was extended to sections of state administration receiving federal grants. The Hatch Act of 1940 forbade campaign contributions by officeholders, with the intention of divorcing the civil service from politics. A 1993 revision of the act allows most civil servants to engage in political activity on their own time.
Looking at the world’s civil services, British considers to be the most outstanding on several counts, extremely powerful because of its permanency, its extensive grants of power from Parliament, and its reputation for absolute honesty, even though it is criticized for a lack of flexibility and for class exclusiveness in its upper ranges (Kingsley, 1944). In 1985, A Civil Service Commission and the beginnings of a system of competitive examinations were established in Great Britain, and the influential Whitley Councils, representing both government employees and administrators in questions dealing with service conditions, were set up after World War II. British civil servants were known to be strictly excluded from politics. On the contrary, in Communist nations, the official party and the civil service have tended to interpenetrate. The secretariat of the League of Nations and of the United Nations is possible precursors of an international civil service.
References:
Appleby, P. H. (1952). Morality and Administration in Democratic Governments. Baton: Louisiana State University Press.
Gerth, H.H. and C. Wright Mills (1958). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kingsley, J. D. (1944). Representative Bureaucracies: An Interpretation of the British Civil Service System. Yellow Spring, O. The Antioch Press.
Krislov, S. and Rosenbloom, D.H. (1981). Representative Bureaucracy and the American Political System. New York: Praeger.
Lee, R.D. Jr. (1993). Public Personnel Systems. Maryland: An Aspen Publication.
Marlow-Ferguson, R. Ed. (2002). World Education Encyclopedia. New York: Gale Group.
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