Political Governance in Westminster Systems.pdf

New Political Governance in Westminster Systems:Impartial Public Administration and ManagementPerformance at Riskgove_1569 177..199

PETER AUCOIN*

This article examines the phenomenon of increased political pressures ongovernments in four Westminster systems (Australia, Britain, Canada,and New Zealand) derived from changes in mass media and communica-tions, increased transparency, expanded audit, increased competition in thepolitical marketplace, and political polarization in the electorate. Thesepressures raise the risk to impartial public administration and managementperformance to the extent that governments integrate governance and cam-paigning, allow political staff to be a separate force in governance, politicizetop public service posts, and expect public servants to be promiscuouslypartisan. The article concludes that New Zealand is best positioned to copewith these risks, in part because of its process for independently staffing itstop public service posts. The article recommends this approach as well as theestablishment of independently appointed management boards for publicservice departments and agencies to perform the governance of manage-ment function.

A public service staffed independently of ministers on the basis ofmerit has long been a central feature of the Westminster model ofpublic administration. This arrangement has always assumed two publicinterest outcomes that justify an override of the executive powers of the

Editors’ Note. Peter Aucoin, a distinguished professor of public administration at DalhousieUniversity and a member of the Governance editorial board, passed away in July 2011. A fewmonths earlier, Peter had submitted the following article to Governance. We sent Peter tworeviews and invited him to submit a revised version of his article. Unfortunately, Peter wasnot able to complete his revisions. As a tribute to our friend and colleague, and in light of themerits of the work, the editors have decided to publish Peter’s initial submission. The tworeviewers of that submission—Jonathan Boston and John Nethercote—have agreed toexpand their reviews into reflections on Peter’s manuscript. Peter’s colleague and collabo-rator Mark D. Jarvis of the University of Victoria copyedited Peter’s text, but it should benoted that we have decided not to make any substantial changes to the initial manuscript.Readers should keep in mind that there might be statements in this article that Peter himselfwould have qualified or omitted if he had the opportunity to complete revisions in light ofthe reviewers’ comments. Further, Peter saw this as the start of an ongoing research program.We do think, however, that the publication of this manuscript and the accompanying reflec-tions is an appropriate tribute to Peter, whose career was distinguished by commitment toopen dialogue on the great questions of contemporary governance.

*Dalhousie University

Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Vol. 25, No. 2,April 2012 (pp. 177–199).© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

democratically elected government. First, the public service is able to actimpartially vis-à-vis citizens because it is not to be used as a partisan toolby the government of the day—the political party or parties in power.Public service positions are not to be awarded on the basis of partisanshipor patronage; the public service is not to be directed or expected to act inways that promote the partisan interests of the governing party or partiesbeyond what is required by their professional duties. Second, the publicservice is able to provide advice to the government and to implement itsprogram in an impartial manner because it is to be staffed on the basisof merit and is to use nonpartisan criteria as the basis for advice andadministrative decisions.

The public management reforms of New Public Management (NPM)that began three decades ago challenged the management performance ofthe public service. It sought to empower departmental managers in orderto improve management performance by freeing them from centralizedcontrols over the management of resources. These reforms also challengedthe de facto independence of the public service from government andsought to assert ministerial direction and control as appropriate to min-isters as government and executive heads of departments in the Westmin-ster model. By empowering managers on the one hand and then assertingpolitical control over them on the other, NPM reforms appeared contra-dictory (Aucoin 1990). This paradox is resolved by the theory that manag-ers need greater management authority for management to secure desiredoutcomes that follow from more explicit policy and program directionfrom ministers, who in turn hold them to account for meeting their expec-tations (Aucoin and Heintzman 2000). Proponents argued that greaterpolitical control of policy and programs in the hands of the elected gov-ernment was appropriate for democratic governance and that this did notundermine management with partisan-political interference in staffing orin the work of the public service that is meant to be impartial.

Over the past three decades, however, this second objective of NPM hastransformed into a form of politicization that explicitly runs counter to thepublic service tradition of impartiality in the administration of publicservices and the nonpartisan management of the public service. Thispoliticization I call New Political Governance (NPG). I do so to distinguishit from the initial NPM efforts of political executives to control their publicservice bureaucracies and not be undermined or obstructed by them as inthe “Yes, Minister” script. In contrast to legitimate democratic control ofthe public service by ministers, NPG constitutes a corrupt form of politi-cization to the extent that governments seek to use and misuse, evenabuse, the public service in the administration of public resources and theconduct of public business to better secure their partisan advantage overtheir competitors (Campbell 2007). At best, this politicization constitutessleazy governance; at worst, it is a form of political corruption that cannotbut undermine impartiality and, thereby, also management performanceto the extent that it assumes management based on nonpartisan criteria.

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NPG is characterized by four main features: the integration of executivegovernance and the continuous campaign, partisan-political staff as a thirdforce in governance and public administration, a personal politicizationof appointments to the senior public service, and an assumption thatpublic service loyalty to, and support for, the government means beingpromiscuously partisan for the government of the day. NPG constitutes anideal type in the sense that the extent to which jurisdictions exhibit thesefeatures will vary over time according to the party in power, the primeminister, the state of competition between parties in the legislature and inthe electorate, and, among other factors, the institutional and statutoryconstraints that provide checks against politicization.

I examine this phenomenon by looking at the experiences of the fourmajor Westminster systems of Australia, Britain, Canada, and NewZealand. The pressures contributing to NPG, as outlined below, are vir-tually the same everywhere, affecting all Western democracies. Theconsequences and responses vary, however. As discussed below, NewZealand, for instance, has essentially escaped the phenomenon of NPG,primarily because it has institutional features not found in the other threeWestminster systems. I conclude by considering what might be done tobetter protect impartiality and management performance against the cor-rupting forces of NPG.

Impartial Public Administration

Impartiality has two critical meanings: first, citizens be treated impartiallyin the administration of public affairs, and second, public servants not actin ways that advantage or disadvantage the partisan-political interests ofany political party, including the governing party or parties. The lattermeans that, at a minimum, public servants not be a party to:

• political influence in the staffing of the public service as a function ofpartisan patronage or cronyism;

• patronage or pork-barreling in the award and distribution of govern-ment projects, grants, contribution, and contracts;

• politicization of the content of public-service communications to themedia and the public, including government advertising; or

• positive or negative comments on matters of government policy orbehavior to the media, legislative committees, or various attentivepublics.

It is the case, of course, that some such practices that would be judgedpartisan in some jurisdictions are accepted in other jurisdictions. It is alsothe case, however, that the standard of what is publicly expected—andacceptable—has risen over time in all four Westminster systems, even ifcontemporary declarations of public service values and ethics do notalways reflect political realities.

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Since democracy is a contest between competing partisan sides, parti-sanship on the part of the public service necessarily diminishes adherenceto fairness between these sides. Impartiality on the part of the publicservice is critical to both the “input” side of the political system—access topublic authority—and the “output” side—the exercise of public authority(Rothstein and Teorell 2008, 169–170, 178–180). The application of theimpartiality principle must establish clear lines between partisan politi-cians and political staff on the one hand and neutral public servants on theother. Of course, there will always be gray areas that need to be tolerated,created by differences of opinion as to what breaches any line that weattempt to draw. Nonetheless, whenever the gray area is permitted to spanmost of the continuum—between what is partial behavior and what isimpartial behavior—the principle is invariably muted. If virtually “any-thing” gets to fall into the gray area, then, to all intents and purposes, theprinciple is discarded as a principle-in-action. Australia, Britain, andCanada have all had recent examples of the impartiality principle beingwashed out by weak or no responses from the public service leadership (insome cases because the culprits were themselves leaders).

Management Reform

Since the early 1980s, public management reform has occurred in all of thefour Westminster jurisdictions (Aucoin 1995). Management reformdemanded “rolling back the state” (Hood 1991), reasserting political direc-tion and control of the bureaucracy, and achieving greater economy andefficiency in the management of public resources. Pollitt’s (1990) earlywork on “managerialism” best captures the essence of this third dimen-sion of management reform as NPM. The focus was on three aspects ofmanagement: (1) the devolution of management authority (“to let manag-ers manage”), (2) the separation of policy and management responsibili-ties (to better clarify and specify what ministers wanted from managers byway of outputs), and (3) the institution of measures to hold managers toaccount for performance in producing the required outputs (“to makemanagers manage”). To the degree that NPM can be said to be a coherentmodel of public administrative reform, these were its three major foun-dations. The focus was on improved management performance. And, notsurprisingly, this focus remains at the forefront. As Bouckaert and Halli-gan (2008, 1) declare, “long-term trends now appear to support the ascen-dancy of performance ideas as a dominant force in public management.”

Streamlining central management agency government-wide controls,clarifying the responsibilities of public service executives for managementand related operations, and enhancing the ways by which these executivesare held to account are the principal NPM messages that have stuck. Therewere excesses that had to be corrected (Pollitt and Talbot 2004). Correc-tions produced some retreat, reversals, and rebalancing of the systems inquestions (Halligan 2006). Nowhere, however, was there a wholesale

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rejection of NPM as public management reform, in theory or practice, anda return to traditional public administration, even if there necessarilyemerged some tension between rhetoric and action, especially in NewZealand (Gregory 2006).

The New Configuration of Political Pressures

Over the past three decades a set of pressures developed that changed thepolitical environment for governments. In important respects, they aremore challenging than the fiscal crises experienced by Western democra-cies in the 1970s and 1980s, as drastic as they appeared at the time. Becausethey are political in character, these pressures tempt governments to dowhatever they deem necessary to stay in power (Roberts 2008). Thesepressures arise from the following developments.

Masses of Media

Politicians now find themselves in an environment where the mass media(television, radio, the Internet, journals, and newspapers) are 24/7, aggres-sive, intrusive, combative, in several cases explicitly partisan, and cateringto specialized and fragmented audiences. In the economic marketplace ofthe media, increased competition produces not only vigorous scrutiny ofpolitics and government but also, and increasingly, tabloid journalism thatis nasty, vile, or worse. Media management now requires virtual instan-taneous response.

The obvious temptation for governments is to treat media that are noton side politically as hostile forces to be managed with tactics that emulatethe worst of the fourth estate themselves: gross misrepresentation, out-right untruths, and the suppression of government information thatshould be publicly accessible according to the law. Not surprisingly, theAustralian, British, and Canadian governments have become both highlycentralized and highly politicized in their media management, an obses-sion of ministers and their political staff. As a result, the public service isunder pressure to engage in media management, including governmentadvertising, in ways that support the government and thus, at a minimum,put their impartiality, including the public’s perception of their impartial-ity, at serious risk.

Transparency and Openness

“Freedom of information” (or public access to government information)regimes have been enacted in all the Westminster systems, althoughBritain only recently caught up with the others. Their utilization by themedia and advocacy groups has had profound consequences, even wheregovernments have struggled mightily to thwart the best efforts of those onthe outside demanding access. More significant still, however, has been


the cumulative effects of the information and communications revolutionthat have made even the most tightly controlled government operations atrisk to leakage, intentional and otherwise.

The major risk to impartiality from this group of pressures is thetemptation of public servants to commit less to paper, to fail to keepappropriate records, and to participate in efforts to restrict what is madepublic. Experience confirms that a diminished adherence to formal pro-cedures constitutes the space for unrecorded political interference, pri-marily by political staff, in what should be impartial processes of publicpolicy implementation.

Auditing the Performance of Government

There has also been a major proliferation in external audit and reviewagencies, coupled with an expansion in the mandates of many existingagencies. The pressures brought to bear by these agencies have beensignificant politically because they invariably possess a high degree ofpublic legitimacy derived from their acceptance as impartial agents ofgood government.

Even though the source of these pressures may be nonpartisan, theyadd to the increasingly turbulent political environment. Given theirimpartial and independent status, a government’s response to a criticalassessment will not usually be a partisan attack, although the currentCanadian Conservative government has attacked a number of indepen-dent agencies, illustrating the extent to which it sees all opposition orcriticism as partisan in character. Media management of the reports ofthese agencies is the expected response from government. The pressuresthat apply to the public service as a consequence find their expression inthe above noted political efforts to secure public service assistance inmanaging the media and in countering the negative assessments of auditand review agencies.

Competition in the Political Marketplace

There has also been an explosion of organized interest groups, advocacygroups, lobbyists, and think tanks (partisan and independent, butincreasingly the former). Political parties are still the primary politicalorganizations insofar as they compete for and hold office, but they nowshare the very crowded political arena with a multiplicity of other politi-cal organizations.

The political pressures on the public service are increased as ministersexpect public servants to protect ministerial interests in their interactionswith these groups and other opinion leaders, especially when conductedin open consultative forums. Governments expect what they regard astheir public servants to promote their agenda in the conduct of theiractivities, notwithstanding the fact that a government’s agenda is neces-sarily a partisan agenda.

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It is one thing to impartially outline and explain a government’s policy.It is quite another to function as a government’s agent in promoting itsagenda. To the extent that the public service is expected to communicatethe government’s message in ways that advance or defend its merits,impartiality is undermined. Not surprisingly, the communications func-tion of government has become the black hole of public service impartial-ity (Mulgan 2007).

Political Volatility and Polarization

The turbulent environment is further exacerbated by the combination of adecline of citizen deference and trust in political authority and a decline ofpartisanship in the citizenry. The combination produces a volatile elector-ate but also one in which there are fewer engaged citizens, includingvoters. Although this has not necessarily made partisan electoral contestsmore competitive, as evidenced by a number of recent long-serving gov-ernments in the Westminster systems considered here, it has meant agreater polarization along partisan lines, as parties pursue policy positionsthat elicit support primarily from their core supporters. Australia, Britain,and Canada have each recently experienced the collapse of the two majorparties alternating as single-party majority governments.

Partisan polarization poses a risk to impartiality insofar as it promotesa dualistic view of politics in which those who are not allies of the gov-ernment must be its enemies. This perspective sends the political signal topublic servants that they need not give priority to the public service valueof impartiality as the government deems impartiality a fiction.

NPG to the Fore

In certain respects, of course, there is nothing new here. Political pressureshave always borne down on the administration of public affairs in demo-cratic government, based as it is on competing partisan sides with differ-ing views on what should be done and how it should done. Politics andadministration are thus uneasily aligned in the coupling of democraticgovernment and nonpartisan public administration. It follows that themere presence of pressures that pose a risk to the impartiality of the publicservice does not necessarily mean that the institution cannot cope withthese pressures. It depends on the institutional strengths and defenses ofthe nonpartisan public service.

The NPG, discussed below, constitutes a response to the pressuresoutlined above. It has several dimensions and, as expected, they arerelated. They are also relative in their development or expression invarious political jurisdictions. And these responses wax and wane as theabove noted political pressures, individually or collectively, intensify orlessen in their impact.


Integrating Governance and Campaigning

The increased concentration of power in the office of the prime ministerhas become a defining feature in Australia, Britain, and Canada, evenwith variations across these systems. The concentration of power islargely seen as a negative development, especially by the media, focusedon prime ministers who are viewed as control freaks, even bullies. Ofrecent prime ministers, Rudd, Brown, and Harper stand out in theseregards. The fact that persons with these personal character traits areable not only to reach the top but to exercise power on their own termsis evidence of the weaknesses of the governmental and party structuresto constrain the concentration of power. But it does not explain it as apolitical phenomenon.

A more positive perspective is offered by those who argue that thecomplexities of modern governance not only encourage but even requirea single focus of central direction and coordination. This is regarded asstrategic government or a priorities and planning style of executive gov-ernance (Campbell 1988). And so the script goes, this can be provided onlyby a chief executive officer who stands alone at the apex of power. Thecollective leadership structure represented by cabinet government is seenas deficient for the purposes of strategic government. It cannot secure thedesired degree of discipline, focus, and efficiency.

This tendency to concentrate power under the prime minister has beenevident in Australia, Britain, and Canada for some time. The prime min-ister is regarded as “the government,” with cabinet as a secondary, evenmarginal, institution of governance, whatever the formalities associatedwith its operation. Tony Blair’s account of the operation of his governmentand its cabinet, as the “ultimate decision maker” but not “the place whereyou do an in-depth discussion of policy,” leaves one knowing full well thatcabinet did not count for much at all (Institute for Government 2010, 10)!In much the same way, Kevin Rudd’s dominance of his governmentenabled him to have a cabinet regime that ensured that ministers were notwell informed in advance of cabinet business, could not be adequatelyadvised by their own departments, and thus were required to decide inways that ran counter to the well-established protocols of Australiancabinet government (Pearson 2010; Waterford 2008). These protocols hadbeen so strong that John Howard did not abandon them until very late inhis premiership. In Canada, the concentration of power has developedover time and is well documented (Savoie 1999, 2008). One survey ofexperts that covered the Canadian prime ministers from Pierre Trudeau toJean Chrétien (1968–2003) placed prime ministerial influence in Canadaahead of all 22 other parliamentary democracies (O’Malley 2007). In 1999,Savoie went so far as to consider the Canadian cabinet to have evolved intonothing more than a “focus group” for the prime minister (1999). UnderStephen Harper, all accounts assert that prime ministerial power is evenmore concentrated (Martin 2010).

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The critical issue with respect to the concentration of power is whetherpower is exercised at the center in the cause of strategic government or ina manner that makes executive governance and continuous partisan cam-paigning a seamless undertaking (MacDermott 2008). In the former case,the concentration of power need not rule out a cabinet structure thatgoverns, albeit in a highly centralized manner (Campbell 2007). In thelatter case, cabinet government is replaced by a form of politicized gov-ernance that gives priority to partisan interests in all things and is domi-nated by the prime minister with an informal cabal containing her or hisfavorite political staff and perhaps a few trusted ministers and publicservants. When politicized governance is in ascendancy, the concentrationof power poses a serious risk to the impartiality of the nonpartisan publicservice. It is this politicized governance that has become more the normthan the exception in Australia, Britain, and Canada over the past twodecades for all but routine government. The risk that comes with thisconcentration of power is that executive power unconstrained tends to bemisused and abused to the partisan advantage of the governing party.1

And since ministers can rarely act alone in the implementation of deci-sions that entail administrative actions, the misuse and abuse of powerinvariably drags the nonpartisan public service into the partisan-politicalvortex.

New Zealand’s recent experience stands out as different here, and itsinstitutional evolution is important in this regard. Throughout most of thetwentieth century, it experienced an extreme tradition of prime ministerialdominance to a degree found only in some Australian states and Canadianprovinces. The adoption of a different electoral system that has producedcoalition governments of various types with two or more parties securingministerial posts as well as a new regime for appointing and managing thetop public service posts that secures independence from prime ministerialcontrol of these senior public servants has brought significant change inthe position of the prime minister. With the constraints on prime minis-terial power imposed by these new institutional factors, New Zealandbecame the system best able to cope with the pressures that elsewhereproduce a concentration of power. And it has done so even with primeministers, most notably Helen Clark, who undoubtedly would havewished to emulate prime ministers in the other three jurisdictions in beingable to exercise greater executive and political power.

Political Staff

The evolution of partisan-political staff as a critical part of executive gov-ernance and public administration has taken place over the past fourdecades. But it now has reached the point where the most trusted politicalstaff of the prime minister can be as influential, or even more influential,as senior ministers or senior public servants. Political staff in the fourWestminster systems vary greatly in number (Aucoin 2010; Eichbaum and


Shaw 2010; Fawcett and Gay 2010; Maley 2010). The Australian and Cana-dian governments have political staff in the several hundreds (400 to 500with some waxing and waning over time), Britain and New Zealand inthe dozens (70 or so). In every case, a critical mass exists in the primeminister’s office.

This state of affairs is not difficult to understand. Political managementmerges executive governance with continuous campaigning (Tiernan2007). In this circumstance, it is not surprising that prime ministers aremore likely to trust and respect the advice from political staff. Politicalstaff are obviously useful to ministers, especially for the purposes ofpolitical management. They are also useful to the public service to theextent that they attend to matters of political management that are beyondthe scope of a nonpartisan public service. In Britain, one of Blair’s cabinetsecretaries, Andrew Turnbull, regarded the system as consisting of “min-isters, special advisers [political staff], and [public service] officials . . . [as]three parts of a triangle, each with separate roles . . .” (Eichbaum and Shaw2010, 219).

The risk with political staff operating as a separate force in govern-ment is not primarily unaccountable behavior or too great an influence onministers. Rather, it is that in promoting and protecting the governmentas the governing party, they all too easily regard the values of a nonparti-san public service and the distinct spheres of authority assigned to publicservants as obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of effective politicalmanagement. The continuous trashing of traditional public service valuesand structures in numerous quarters simply reinforces the perceptions ofpolitical managers that public servants will invariably stand in the way ofa government implementing its agenda unless they can be co-opted asallies.

Again, the major exception here is New Zealand (Eichbaum and Shaw2010). Here political staff have been important for the same reasons aselsewhere—political policy advice and attention to the implementation ofthe government’s agenda—and, unique to New Zealand until the after-math of the British 2010 election, as advisers in the formation of coalitiongovernments and the negotiation of the coalition’s program. But, com-pared to elsewhere, they have been constrained by two important factors,and the risk to impartiality and management performance mitigatedaccordingly. First, they cannot roam freely throughout government, evenas agents of the prime minister, since the prime minister is leader of acoalition government and not simply of the governing party. Second, thesenior public service is staffed and managed independently of the primeminister, thus reducing, if not eliminating, the incentive of public servantsto do the bidding of political staff in order to endear themselves to thosewho might influence the progress of their careers. A lengthy tenure of theBritish coalition formed after the 2010 election should be expected, otherthings being equal, to have the same general effects on the conduct ofpolitical staff, especially vis-à-vis public servants.

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Personal Politicization of Public Service

In the first phases of public management reform, prime ministers singledout the senior mandarins as the leadership of the bureaucracy for specialattention. They wanted them to be politically responsive.

In Britain, one of the first issues for Margaret Thatcher was herinvolvement in the appointment of permanent secretaries. Indeed,Thatcher’s engagement was key to the development of the concept of“personalization” (or “personal politicization”) of the staffing of thesenior public service. She was not interested in appointing Tory partisansto these posts, but she did want people who were clearly onside thegovernment’s agenda and who could get things done. Blair was equallyimpatient and attended to the appointment of permanent secretaries. Inaddition to giving permission for a handful of political staff to issuedirectives to public servants, he also appointed a number of nonpublicservants to public service posts in the Cabinet Office (Sausman and Locke2004).

In Australia, a public service board that enabled the mandarin class toall but appoint its own preferences was abolished in 1987, and the powerto recommend departmental secretary appointments to the prime ministerwas given to the secretary of the department of the prime minister andcabinet (Podger 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Shergold 2007). Tenure disappeared assecretaries were placed on fixed-term contracts, with the prime ministerdeciding on performance. Despite consistent rhetoric that the traditionof a nonpartisan public service has been maintained throughout, primeministers have continuously demonstrated that they are willing to dismisssecretaries or not renew their contracts; to bring people in from outsidethe Commonwealth public service, as both Howard and Rudd did withhigh-profile appointments, and again as both Howard and Rudd did, toappoint a new secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister andCabinet following the change of government.

In Canada, the prime minister appoints the top two ranks of thepublic service—deputy ministers and associate deputy ministers, acadre of senior public service executives now number roughly six dozen.Prime ministerial attention to at least the most important of these postsis long-standing (Campbell and Szablowski 1979). In practice, thesenior ranks of the Canadian public service remain almost exclusivelythe preserve of the career Canadian public service. External appoint-ments to deputy minister positions are rare and even then usually notknown partisans. Appointments are primarily decided on the recom-mendation of the prime minister’s own deputy minister, who is also thehead of the public service and is advised by a committee of deputyministers.

In the three jurisdictions where these appointments are made by theprime minister, the key concern and risk for impartiality are the degree towhich these appointees consider themselves personal agents of the prime


minister with obligations (or at least career incentives) to do whateverneeds to be done to protect and promote the interests of the primeminister, which at times are also partisan-political interests. Whenappointments are made by the prime minister there is the inevitabletendency for some public servants looking for promotions to be “exces-sively eager to please,” as Michael Keating (2003, 96), a former secretary tothe department of the prime minister and cabinet in Australia, succinctlyput it.

Insiders in all three jurisdictions are well aware that some public ser-vants do not make it to the top ranks at all, and some who do get thereare later edged out by others for the very top positions, for reasons thatgo beyond merit. What is beyond merit is the political assessment of thecandidates for these positions by the prime minister and her or his politi-cal staff. For example, former Canadian Prime Minister Chrétien (2007,39) admitted that the power to make these appointments was needed asa form of political control lest “the elected government not be in chargeof running anything.” He preferred to view his deputy ministers as“allies” of the ministry (Chrétien 2007, 37). When an independent com-mission examining the scandal that brought down the Liberal govern-ment of his successor recommended a more independent appointmentprocess for deputy ministers (Canada 2006a), Chrétien’s view wasechoed by a self-appointed group of establishment notables, includingformer ministers and deputy ministers, who claimed the commission’srecommendation to be flawed in political governance terms. They wentso far as to portray deputy ministers as the prime minister’s “vicepresidents”—the prime minister being viewed as the CEO of the gov-ernment. The selection of these officials was deemed “too important atask to entrust to any kind of selection system detached from the politicalprocess” (Canada 2006b, emphasis added). According to this script, politi-cal factors should count in deciding who is and who is not appointed bythe prime minister. Personal politicization is justified. The risk to impar-tiality is nowhere to be seen.

By contrast, in New Zealand, the appointment of departmental chiefexecutives (previously called permanent heads) was changed so that min-isters could have some input into their selection rather than have themappointed independently by a commission, as was the case prior to 1988(Boston 1994). As it transpired, however, the new process became the mostindependent in the Westminster systems, and is now viewed as meritori-ous precisely because it does secure independent staffing as well as inde-pendent management of the chief executive cadre (Gregory 2004). Themechanism is the State Services Commissioner who recommends a singlecandidate to the cabinet. There is a democratic safety valve in that cabinetcan reject, and even appoint someone of its own choosing, although therejection and the name of the person rejected must be made public. Otherthan one rejection years ago, the Commissioner’s recommendations haveprevailed.

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The Public Service as Promiscuously Partisan

Prime ministers and their political advisors pay attention to who occupiesthe senior posts in the public service for the simple reason that the per-formance of the entire public service is important for the success of thegovernment, in both governmental and political terms. But governmentscan also want their public service to be publicly supportive, even enthu-siastic, about their agenda and to promote it in their consultations withstakeholders as well as in their delivery of services directly to the public.To the degree that governments have this expectation of enthusiasticsupport, it goes beyond the traditional requirement of loyalty to the gov-ernment of the day. It substitutes partisan loyalty for impartial loyalty.

The risk of politicization is enhanced by the fact that public servants, atvarious levels, are now much more exposed publicly in their dealings withstakeholders, organized interests, individual citizens, the media, and par-liamentarians. The anonymity of public servants, as invisible to parliamentor the public, disappeared some time ago. In the environment of NPG,moreover, ministers, sometimes explicitly, usually implicitly, expect thosepublic servants who are seen and heard in countless public forums tosupport government policy, that is, to go beyond mere description andexplanation. The expectation is not that they engage in the partisan-political process, for example, at elections or political rallies. Rather, it isthat they be promiscuously or serially partisan, that is, to be the agents ofthe government of the day in relation to stakeholders, organized interests,citizens, media, and parliamentarians as they engage in consultations,service delivery, media communications, reporting to parliament, andappearing before parliamentary committees. Ministers recognize thatmuch of this work can be conducted without becoming political. Butwhen the public value of what the government is doing is disputed, theyexpect public servants to rise to the challenge. To the degree that ministerscan expect public servants to do so without instruction, the culture isinfested with the norm of promiscuous partisanship. The view that thepublic service can be promiscuously or serially partisan, by supportinggovernment policy or actions, or partisan in some circumstances but not inothers, is not unknown in the Westminster tradition (Mulgan 2008; Wilson1991).

The culture of promiscuous partisanship is nowhere articulated as thenorm for the public service. Everywhere, impartiality remains the offi-cial doctrine. Indeed, if anything, it is asserted more often now as codesof conduct and values are proclaimed. Yet, breaches are commonplace.For instance, in Britain, the permanent secretary of the Treasury edits abook with a senior political staff person on the government’s economicpolicy that lauds the policy but only a few eyebrows are raised, and heis later promoted to the post of Cabinet Secretary. In Australia, an agencyhead appears in a partisan government advertisement promoting thegovernment’s policy and is essentially excused by the Public Service


Commissioner, much to the delight of the prime minister. In Canada, thepublic service leadership experiences a major scandal that clearly dem-onstrated the consequences of the public service acting promiscuouslypartisan up and down the hierarchy, but then portrays the scandal—ascandal that brought down the government—as an isolated incidentoccasioned by a few rogue bureaucrats.

The typical response to these and other such instances of public ser-vants crossing the line of impartiality in support of the government is toview the matter, as in the Canadian case above, as an aberration, or as inthe British case, as simply part of the reality of modern public adminis-tration, or as in the Australian case, as belonging to that gray area betweenwhat is and what is not acceptable but where, in practice, the gray area isallowed to cover so much ground that virtually anything gets excused. Inall these instances, a deep denial of there being anything systemic amisscharacterizes the status quo. The Canadian scandal is especially instructivein this regard because it occurred over several years, included warnings toministers from public servants at all levels including even from the verytop, and yet, at the most critical times, the accommodative culture ofpromiscuous partisanship kicked in and public servants crossed the line.As a former dean of the retired deputy minister cadre put it: “It was clearwhat people at the political level wanted. They [public servants] got theirmarching orders and they marched.” To do otherwise would have been“quite foreign to the way we [the Canadian public service] function his-torically, which is to just do as you’re told” (Arthur Kroeger, quoted inGreenway 2004).

Responding to NPG

There is no reason to assume that these NPG forces will abate in the nearfuture because there is no reason to assume that the underlying pressureswill abate. The challenge, then, is how to enhance and safeguard impar-tiality and management performance in the context of forces that inher-ently threaten politicization and, thereby, the risk of political corruption.The New Zealand case demonstrates the robustness of the institutionalchecks and balances that come from an electoral system that is unlikely toproduce single-party majority government with the executive and primeministerial dominance that comes with this outcome.2 Coalition govern-ments are likely to enhance the role of cabinet and individual ministers inexecutive governance and thus constrain the prime minister, and todiminish the capacity of a prime minister’s political staff to act acrossgovernment. In the major governing parties in New Zealand and Austra-lia, the retention of the power of caucus to dismiss a prime minister alsoserves as a constraint on prime ministerial power (Weller 1994), eventhough it is an extreme measure. And reform initiatives to remove theunilateral powers of the prime minister or ministers to make appoint-ments to a wide variety of quasi-independent or arm’s length executive,

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regulatory, or even parliamentary agencies, as are now well established inBritain (Flinders 2009), also diminish the powers of the prime minister. Sotoo do measures to reduce the risk of political corruption in governmentwork, such as in government advertising, a flourishing area of partisan-ship in some governments, including Australia and Canada. These variousconstraints on prime ministerial power reduce the risk of political corrup-tion in the abuse and misuse of the public service.

The two most important institutional changes involve the independentstaffing of the top posts in the public service and the establishment ofindependent boards to perform the governance of management functionin departments. The first is reasonably straightforward in that it builds ona tradition of independent staffing in all four systems, and New Zealandhas had independent staffing of top posts in place for some time. Thesecond would be a significant change, even though it would build onsome recent developments, as noted below, developments that have notbeen widely known or as yet, with a few exceptions, well researched. Thediscussion of the second change requires considerably more space thanthe first change.

Independent Staffing for Public Service Impartiality

From the perspective of impartial public administration, the most impor-tant development in the historical evolution of the Westminster systemwas the adoption, over a century ago, of the ideal and practice of theindependent staffing of the public service. Independent staffing, includingappointments, promotions, and dismissal for cause, was and is meant tosecure three objectives: first, the elimination of partisan-political influencein staffing the public service to remove any partisan abuse or misuse ofpublic service staffing; second, staffing decisions based on merit so that thegovernment and public are served by public servants qualified to performthe functions of public administration; and third, the protection of publicservants from inappropriate partisan-political demands by political execu-tives (or their political staff) so that public servants can act and be seen toact in a nonpartisan and impartial manner in carrying out their functions.

The staffing of the top positions in the public service by the primeminister in Australia, Britain, and Canada, whatever the merits of theadvisory process leading to these decisions and even with appointmentscoming from the career public service, now constitutes a serious excep-tion to the normative structure of a nonpartisan public service (Aucoin2006). This is especially the case since those appointed by the primeminister (i.e., Australian departmental secretaries, British permanentsecretaries, and Canadian deputy ministers) now have the statutory ordelegated authority to staff their departments, including, with somevariations, the senior executives who are their immediate subordinatesand their future successors.


Establishing an independent structure for staffing (and managing) thetop ranks of the public service would not be unique in the Westminstersystems. As noted, New Zealand has created a process that does just this,subject to an override by the government that represents a reasonabledemocratic safety value for use in extreme circumstances. Independentstaffing, as noted above, must encompass more than initial appointment.It could encompass both open competition for appointments or appoint-ments from within the public service, with or without competition. Theindependent staffing authority should also be given authority for manag-ing the senior executive cadre as a corporate resource of the public service.In this regard, it could also be linked to a new system for the governanceof management at the departmental/agency level so that the promotion ofmanagement performance entails more than exhortation and oversight bycentral corporate-management agencies.

Departmental Boards for the Governance of Management

Having a nonpartisan public service independently staffed on the basis ofmerit should promote impartial public administration and managementperformance. This should especially be the case if the very top positionsare encompassed by this system. However, management performancerequires more than having the very best managers rise to the top. It alsoprovides the checks and balances on how they exercise their powers; inshort, a robust “governance of management” regime is also required.There are four structures now in use in the Westminster systems for thegovernance of management.

First, and everywhere, there is the continued use of central manage-ment agencies to govern the functions of management, including espe-cially the management of human and financial resources. Over the pastthree decades, the streamlining of long-standing central agency controlsover departmental management has occurred (Bakvis and Juillet 2004) aswell as some significant devolution of management authority to depart-ment public service heads. Gone are most, but not all, centrally imposedstandardized, government-wide, one-size-fits-all regulations. With thisstreamlining, the capacity of central agencies to use simple compliancewith rules as the major form for the governance of management dimin-ishes significantly. However, the devolution of greater managementauthority to departmental managers was accompanied by the demand fora greater measure of accountability for management performance on thepart of these departmental managers (Aucoin and Jarvis 2005).

Responsibility within government for holding empowered departmentheads to account was everywhere assumed to still be the task of the centralmanagement agencies. The various performance management regimesfor holding public service management to account, and for promotingimproved performance, have served some useful purposes, especiallywhere performance can be measured quantitatively and checklists of

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expected performance can be used. However, the constant revision ofthese systems, again everywhere, demonstrates that their utility shouldnot be exaggerated. What the record makes clear is that central agenciesalone cannot adequately perform the governance of management functionin governments where departments have devolved significant manage-ment authority and have then developed their own management policiesand practices to fit their particular lines of public business. Central agen-cies have neither the capacity nor the time to do more than standardizedassessments. Something more is required.

The second approach is a form of self-governance of managementwhereby the governance of management and the practice of managementare merged into one structure. The Australian and British governmentshave adopted this approach as a public sector emulation of the corporategovernance movement in the private sector. Under this model, the depart-mental management hierarchy functions as a governance board, chairedby the department secretary/permanent secretary, who, of course, is alsothe chief public service executive of the department.

In Britain, the Treasury adopted a code for the corporate governance ofministerial departments (HM Treasury, July 2005). The code, in place from2005 to 2010 (when it was revised to accommodate a different structure, asoutlined below), required each department to establish a “board” thatincluded at least two “independent non-executive members to ensure thatexecutive members [the department’s senior management] are supportedand constructively challenged in their role” (HM Treasury, 2005, 11). Theindependent nonexecutive members were appointed by the permanentsecretary, with the consent of the minister.

These departmental boards are essentially the senior management ofthe department sitting as a collective body. However, two aspects of theseboards distinguished them from the traditional governance of the depart-ment (Wilks 2007, 450–451). First, there was “the stress of collective boardresponsibility,” as opposed to the individual responsibilities of eachmember of the senior management and their respective relationships inwhat was clearly a departmental hierarchy of positions. Second, there wasthe emphasis on “the independence” of the nonexecutive members (one ofwhom should ideally chair the departmental audit committee). Theseboards were to function as a corporate body, and some of the members—the independent nonexecutive members—had special responsibilities forchallenging the executive members, that is, the departmental managers.The role and influence of these boards varied, in part because they wereviewed within government as something of an experiment, an innovationin the making, if only because the idea of an advisory board havinggovernance functions is a circle not quite squared (Parker et al. 2010).

In Australia, there are no independent, nonexecutive members. As inBritain, the boards are meant to be regarded as having collective respon-sibilities but, also as in Britain, have no separate authority; they are merelyadvisory to the department secretary. The self-governance model is one


that can be found in the private sector, where in some corporations theboard of a corporation is dominated by executive members, and with thechief executive officer also the chair of the board (although a corporateboard would have separate formal collective authority). The relativeabsence of checks and balances on the executive members gives the modellow scores from corporate governance experts. On this criterion, Australiagets very low scores (and, it might be noted, there was nothing to indicateany change in the Rudd government’s 2010 “blueprint for the reform ofAustralian government administration”) (Australia 2010). At best, thecollective character of the board introduces peer pressures to promotemanagement performance.

The third approach is the one taken by the British Conservative–LiberalDemocrat coalition government formed after the 2010 election based onthe Conservatives’ election campaign promises. This path moves awayfrom the governance of management as represented, however awkwardly,in the Treasury corporate governance model (Wilks 2007) toward an inte-gration of the governance of policy and management. The new structurethus entails a board for each department that is chaired by the secretary ofstate, the senior minister of the department. The composition must includetwo to four other ministers, three to four nonexecutive members (themajority from the commercial private sector with experience in managinglarge organizations) who are to be appointed by the secretary of state, andthree of four senior departmental executives, including the permanentsecretary and the finance director.

The assertion of political control is clear in this model, with the secre-tary of state as chair, other ministers on the board, and the nonexecutivedirectors being the appointees of the secretary of state. Together theyclearly dominate the board, although the board is merely advisory to thesecretary of state. This plan, announced well before the election by FrancisMaude, then the Conservative shadow minister and now the sponsoringminister, raised considerable concern in various civil service circles at thetime. The proposed scheme gave every indication that management wouldbe sucked into the political vortex. In addition to ministers and theirpolitical staff, departmental civil servants now have to confront yetanother cadre of ministerial political appointees whom civil servantsmight be forgiven for not seeing as independent of their ministers.3

Equally important, with no distinction established between governanceand management, it is not at all clear how a minority of nonexecutivedirectors “will galvanise departmental boards as forums where politicaland official leadership is brought together to drive up performance”(Cabinet Office, United Kingdom 2010).

The fourth model is provided by a lone Canadian government depart-ment. In this case, the department structure contains a department boardexclusively for the governance of management. The model combinesan independent board for the governance of management with the tradi-tional structure of ministerial responsibility for departmental policy

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and programs. The department is the Canadian government’s revenuedepartment—the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), as it is called.4 The CRAcan be considered a new form of ministerial department (Brown 2009).The traditional departmental powers of the minister over policy and pro-grams are undisturbed, and the minister is served by a public servicedepartment, headed by a deputy minister who remains the minister’spublic service policy adviser in the traditional mode. But there is also aboard of management to govern the management of the department, andthis board is almost entirely independent of the departmental executivemanagement team. The board is established by statute, and its statutoryresponsibilities for management are defined therein. The board is a gov-ernance board in these respects and not merely an advisory body. One ofits functions is to advise the deputy minister, but the board also mustapprove the management policies and systems of the department. Theboard may also give advice to the minister.

The key elements of this design are the de facto independent staffing ofthe board (the result of an accidental development5), a board compositionwhere all members but the deputy minister are nonexecutive members, anonexecutive member appointed as chair, and the legislative assignmentof significant management authorities to the board that give the boardsufficient powers to direct, control, and oversee the management perfor-mance of the deputy minister and department. The minister possesses apower to issue directives on any subject that falls within the board’sauthority, but any such directives must be publicly proclaimed and tabledin Parliament.

The CRA board has been given high marks for its effect on managementperformance and for insulating the agency management from potentialpolitical influence over what should be management matters (Canada,Canada Revenue Agency 2005; Plumptre 2007). Nonetheless, this uniqueCanadian model has not been emulated in the Canadian government,although it has been proposed for the federal police force, which hasexperienced a number of major management debacles, even scandals, overthe past decade.

It is not surprising that there is little enthusiastic support for indepen-dent management boards in government departments among seniorpublic servants. Except for annual or periodic central agency reviews andaudits from parliamentary agencies, departmental administrative headsare otherwise free from any ongoing oversight of their management per-formance. Ministers intervene occasionally, appropriately, or otherwise,but that does not usually take the form of continuous oversight for thepurposes of evaluation of management performance. In short, depart-mental public service executives find themselves in a situation where theyboth govern management and are management, where the departmenthead (as CEO) is also the chair of the management board and the board isessentially advisory to the department head, and where there are noindependent nonexecutive board members.


The utility of well-designed boards for governing management shouldcome as no surprise. Performance management can never be based entirelyon performance measurement (Aucoin and Jarvis 2005; Bouckaert andHalligan 2008). It requires the exercise of judgment, based on expertise andexperience, brought to an ongoing dialogue that includes those with theauthority to govern management and those with the authority to manage.Ministers cannot perform this function, however they are advised. Nor cancentral corporate-management agencies. Ministers and central agencieshave functions to perform in these regards, but they need dedicated andindependent structures to conduct performance management as the gov-ernance of management. The success of the board in promoting perfor-mance, through its powers as well as the independence of its boardmembers, conforms to the findings of agency boards in the Netherlands,albeit for the boards of arm’s length agencies rather than for the boards of aministerial department (Bovens, Schillemans, and ’t Hart 2008).

Conclusion

NPG has exposed the leadership of the public service to the vagaries of thepartisan-politics process not only inside the executive government arenabut also in the public forums of Parliament, public consultations, and themedia. The forces that underpin NPG are not merely transient. But theeffects of NPG can be tempered by institutional changes to the publicservice as an institution of executive government that is meant to benonpartisan, act impartially, provide quality public service to ministersand citizens, and be accountable for its management and administrativeperformance. Aside from changes to the political institutions of govern-ment, the most crucial of these changes are that its leadership become partof the public service, in law, by being staffed independently and that themanagement performance of its senior executives be independently gov-erned and held accountable within the executive arena of government atthe level of each department.

Notes

1. An explicit acknowledgment of this pattern is provided by a former chief ofstaff to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper who candidly discussestwo major instances (Geddes 2009).

2. The Australian prime minister and government have also been constrainedin recent decades by the absence of a government majority in the Senate.

3. The Institute for Government issued a report on the subject of governmentboards before the election that recommended there be a strategic boardheaded by the minister and a management board headed by the permanentsecretary (Parker et al. 2010).

4. The department is called an agency but ought not be considered part of theagencification phenomenon most commonly associated with the ExecutiveAgency design in Britain.

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5. The accident occurred as a result of a proposed design of the revenuedepartment as an independent national tax corporation that would haveinvolved both the federal and provincial governments. When this idea wasshelved the planning was sufficiently advanced so that the appointmentprocess for what would have been a board of directors was retained. Thismeant that 11 of the 15 directors are essentially appointed by the provincialand territorial governments independently of the federal government.

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Documents

Political Governance in Westminster Systems.pdf