Anglo-American civil service systems: an overview

Abstract

The Anglo-American civil services cover two of the classic models of government administration and several smaller systems with reputations for innovative public management that have been influential internationally. The countries involved are identified with a specific administrative tradition and a distinctive reform agenda of the last 20 years, providing the rationale for a separate volume in the series Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective.This volume examines five countries that have similar civil services and whose development pathways have been interlinked across three centuries. The primary purpose is to analyse key elements of each system in order to facilitate comparison. A country's civil service can be expected to reflect and illustrate an administrative tradition, but it can also be exposed to fundamental challenges that affect central features of the service. An important facet of this study, therefore, is how these civil services have responded in an era of reform.The second focus is on the reform pattern associated with these countries, which has been highly distinctive compared with those in other OECD countries. The Anglo-American countries under discussion have invested heavily in reform during the last three decades -and longer if earlier initiatives are counted. The reform dimension has been accorded prominence because it has become a dominant feature of civil services internationally in the last 25 years, especially in the countries featured here. Indeed, several of them are regarded as the most active reformers in the OECD and as the chief purveyors of a distinctive reform paradigm, known as 'managerialism', or 'new public management' (NPM). This volume reviews the results of the reform era for a set of countries that have reformed extensively but are now reassessing the results.A number of questions arise about country pathways and where they lead, about the reform patterns and how they relate to tradition, and about the impact on the civil service of a period of great change. These serve to indicate the interrelationships between the two dimensions -an evolving civil service and major public management reform.

The financialization of the state: Government debt management reforms in New Zealand and Ireland

“…Both institutions not only lead to strong executive (lower parliamentary) control over public finance but also strengthen civil servants’ impact on public policy making (e.g. Grube, 2015; Halligan, 2003). In addition, the countries are representative of small states with open, liberal market economies challenged by severe economic and fiscal crises in the 1980s that triggered a series of reforms.…”

“…While New Zealand strongly diverged from the British Whitehall system, Ireland has stuck with it until today (Halligan, 2003: 2; Millar and McKevitt, 2000: 41, 48). As Hardiman and MacCarthaigh (2010a: 370) argue, ‘[t]he Irish civil service adopted an organizational practice and structure similar to that of the British Whitehall system’, which was generalist, closed and hierarchical.…”

Policy work at the sub‐national level: Analytical styles of Canadian and Czech directors and managers

“…Canada is commonly seen as having an Anglo‐Saxon (Westminster) administrative tradition (Halligan ). The growth of the modern Canadian state after 1945 led to administrative expansion and greater capacity as new public policy programs were introduced (Dwivedi and Halligan ) and trained experts became indispensable to governments (Brooks ).…”