ECPR Joint Sessions 2012 in Antwerp
Workshop: The European Public Servant: A Shared Administrative Identity?
Models of Civil Servants and the Crisis of National Democracy: From ‘Politics as Vocation’ to the ‘effective bureaucrat’ - Some Theoretical Lessons
Gayil Talshir
Bureaucracy, in the Weberian model, was the quintessential mark of the modern state, and with it perhaps the symbol of disenchanted, albeit professional, politics. Yet the praxis of crystallizing the public service, its training and its image became a key feature of the different political cultures of European nations. Each nation-state has developed a different model of civil service, thus projecting its vision of its national – or civic – character. European civic cultures are thus reflected in the image of their particular images of civil service.
The changes in the training and images of the public servant also reflect the changing role of the state, in face of the dominance of new public management and the processes of privatization following the crowning of neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of the last generation. This recent process enables, on the one hand, a thinner concept of civil servants thus facilitating a convergence movement to a European-style effective bureaucrat, yet this model is constructed upon a consumerist Vs. civic model of bureaucracy and a post-Weberian, post-national, but maybe also post-political vision of the civil service.
This paper has two wings – a theoretical and comparative ones. On the theoretical level, it wishes to challenge Weber notion’s of disenchantment using the image of national bureacracies as a case in point. The argument is that while the professional bureaucrat was to portray an image of dis-interested profession, the image of the civil servant became essential in reflecting the political culture of the different nation-states. It thus symbolizes political re-enchantment. On the comparative level, this paper sets out to investigate the role of the public servant as a reflection of civic culture based on a comparative analysis of public service training (ideal and praxis) in three nations – France, England and Israel. It demonstrates the diverse models of civil service and hence of state-citizen relationship, but also the grave effect of neoliberalism on the transformation of the image and training of the civil service. Back on the theoretical level, the argument would be that, paradoxically, it is the current, converging model of the ‘effective bureaucrat’ that better resembles Weber’s notion of disenchantment, as well as facilitates a European model of public administration, however, this merely marks the second crisis of legitimacy, a crisis of democracy.
