POL S101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Rational Agent, New Public Management, Indian Civil Service (British India)
7 Jun 2018
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2018-06-05
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CHAPTER 10
Bureaucracies, Policymaking, and Governance
The Civil Service
•Many modern states organize themselves on the model of the British civil service
•Northcote-Trevelyan Report (1854)
oEstablishment of regular staff for routine tasks and administration for policy formulation
oRecruitment based on competitive examination
The Civil Service, cont’d
•Bureaucracies intended to be neutral
•Bureaucrats exchange political commitment for job security
•This can pose problems if new leaders want to introduce sweeping reforms
•In the US, the President can appoint up to 9,000 senior bureaucratic officials (a tiny portion
of the ~3 million government bureaucrats)
The Civil Service, cont’d
•Different forms of bureaucracy formed in different countries
•Greater tendency for overlap between administrative, political, and business elites in
Europe
•Colonial powers often exported their bureaucratic style to their colonial holdings
The Indian Civil Service (ICS)
•Bureaucracies can have very positive effects
•Modeled on the British civil service, the ICS is credited with:
1. Creating a sense of Indian unity
2. Facilitating good, limited government
3. Proving that the modern state can put public interest above private interest
“Embedded Autonomy”
•Term borrowed from developmental political economy and coined by Peter Evans
•Bureaucratic decision-makers are influenced by society, but also detached enough to
determine the public interest and follow an appropriate path
•Used to help explain the economic and administrative success of Asian countries
Theories of Bureaucratic
Policymaking
•Principal–agent relations: refers to situations where the actions of two or more agents must
be harmonized, even if their interests are not the same
•Policy makers (principals) and bureaucrats (agents) are in a hierarchical relationship
•Principal–agent relationships can be nested within each other
Theories of Bureaucratic
Policymaking, cont’d
•Two main aims:
1. To clarify how bureaucracies make decisions
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