Administrative Values and Public Personnel Management

Abstract

Civil service reforms implemented over the past 35 years in many countries around the world have relaxed traditional merit system rules, decentralized the personnel function, and augmented agency and managerial discretion. One objective of these reforms has been to boost government productivity and increase the efficiency of core personnel management functions such as hiring and firing employees, but much of the available evidence suggests that reforms commonly implemented may serve political or ideological objectives better than performance-related goals. We argue for a fuller appreciation of the political motivations for reforms and a broader understanding of their implications. Keywords civil service reform, merit systems, evidence-based reformsRecommendations for reform aimed at improving the economy and efficiency of government operations occur with relative frequency in countries around the world. In the recent past, many of these proposals have focused on civil service practices and have sought to relax merit system rules and decentralize public personnel management operations. Interest in these kinds of reforms began to emerge in the late 1970s as a reaction to the inflexibility of traditional civil service structures and the constraints those systems placed on managerial discretion in such core areas as hiring, placement, compensation, and discipline. Reform efforts continued through the 1990s and into the

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