The Anglo-American Tradition

The Anglo-American tradition is perhaps the most difficult to characterize. Although there are common roots, there has been a divergence between the United Kingdom and other Westminster systems and the United States. There are common roots among these cases, including a contractarian conception of the state, an emphasis on the separation of politics and administration, an emphasis on management rather than law in the role definition of public administrators, and less commitment to uniformity. But these common values are interpreted and implemented differently in the different countries. For example, the United States has a more developed system of administrative law than do most of the Westminster systems. All these administrative systems, however, have been more receptive to the ideas of New Public Management (NPM) than have other governments, although the United States and Canada had implemented many of those ideas long before NPM was developed.

Persistence and Change in Public Administration

By focusing on administrative traditions this book has emphasized the persistence of administrative patterns. But despite persistence, bureaucracies also change. They change because their tasks change, because the political and social environment changes, and perhaps most importantly because ideas about public administration change. These patterns of change lead into a discussion of convergence, and the question of whether all administrative systems are becoming alike. This chapter summarizes the findings in the book and evaluates models of change and reform when compared to models of persistence. The conclusion is that despite some changes in similar directions, administrative traditions are retaining much of their distinctiveness and they can still be used as a foundation for comparison.

Transferring Traditions

The European powers who ruled areas of Africa during parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought with them ideas about public administration. Although they may have governed their colonies somewhat differently, they did use models of public administration brought from home to rule, and also to train local administrators. After independence the former colonial powers continued to have some influence over governance in the new nations. This chapter examines the extent to which the administrative traditions have influenced administration in the former colonies, as well as the interaction of traditional forms of governance with “modern” styles of governance coming from the Global North. This chapter focuses on Africa but the same questions could be raised about the impact of colonial administration in other parts of the world.

The Administrative Tradition Approach to Public Bureaucracy

This chapter develops the model of administrative traditions that functions as the framework for the remainder of the book. The argument is that contemporary public bureaucracies are influenced significantly by their historical roots, and that many features of contemporary bureaucracy can be understood through the historically rooted administrative traditions. The model of administrative traditions developed in this chapter has a number of components. First is the nature of the state in which public administration functions. Second is whether there is an emphasis on law or management in defining the role of public servants. The third dimension is the relationship between politics and public administration, followed by the service orientation of public servants. The fifth element of the model is the nature of the career patterns of public servants. Another political dimension concerns the role of social actors in influencing the bureaucracy. Administrative traditions also are concerned with the degree of uniformity in public services throughout the country. The final dimension of the model of administrative traditions is the degree and form of accountability. This model of administrative traditions is based on the experiences of Western Europe, but also has relevance in many other settings.

The Scandinavian Tradition

The Scandinavian countries have a distinctive administrative tradition, although there is a good deal of variance among the four countries on some aspects of public administration. Although all democratic countries have some separation between administration and politics, this tends to be more pronounced in the Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden. Second, the administrative systems are closely linked with social actors through corporatist or corporate pluralist systems. This representation of the social interests is one component of an emphasis on participation in the public sector. And finally, public administration in these countries is responsible for delivering a large array of services associated with the welfare state. Despite the emphasis on the welfare state, public administration in these countries has been more open to New Public Management than the administrative systems in continental countries.

Other Administrative Traditions

The four traditions constituting the bulk of this book are from Western Europe. This chapter expands the analysis to look at four other administrative traditions. One is Central and Eastern Europe. Some countries in this region have been heavily influenced by Western European traditions, especially those of the former Hapsburg Empire, but they also display a number of distinctive features. A second tradition is Islamic administration, which has been influenced both by religion and by national cultures. Third, there is Asian public administration, and the question of the importance of the Confucian model is a central question when dealing with this tradition. Finally, there is administration in Latin America, still influenced by its Iberian past but which has been influenced also by the Napoleonic tradition and to a lesser extent by the United States. The same elements of administrative traditions used in reference to Western European countries are applied to these four traditions.

The Germanic Tradition

Like the Napoleonic tradition, the Germanic tradition of public administration is based on law. In addition it is based on the ideas of Max Weber about the nature of a proper public bureaucracy, including factors such as the bureaucrat acting according to the law and obeying hierarchical superiors, the presence of files, and some form of accountability. In addition to the legal foundation, several other features stand out concerning the Germanic administrative tradition. One is the acceptance of political connections for the upper echelons of the administrative system. Another important feature is the limited concern with uniformity, given the federal structure of government, even given the common administrative law within the country. Also, the German administrative system has some corporatist elements, involving social actors in government decisions. Like the Napoleonic tradition, the Germanic tradition has also been diffused to countries such as Austria and Switzerland.

The European Union as a Distinctive Tradition?

The bureaucracy of the European Union, housed within the European Commission, is different from most other bureaucracies. It does very little implementation—that is done by the member states—and focuses on making policies. In addition, this bureaucracy employs individuals from all the member states, and many of those employees are in Brussels for only a short time before returning to their national bureaucracies. The question posed in this chapter is whether the bureaucracy of the European Union has been able to develop an administrative tradition of its own, or whether it is merely an amalgam of the traditions of the member states. Yet another option is that each Directorate General within the Commission has its own distinctive culture, based in part on the policy domain for which it is responsible and the individuals employed.

Understanding Comparative Bureaucracy

Public bureaucracies are central institutions in the delivery of public services. There has been, however, some tendency to consider all bureaucracies as fundamentally the same. This chapter rejects that assumption and examines a number of different ways of comparing public bureaucracies, including rational choice theory, administrative culture, organization theory, and institutionalism. These approaches have supplied both qualitative and quantitative data for the comparison of administrative systems, and demonstrate the diversity of public administration around the world. These approaches serve as the background to the study of administrative traditions as another powerful approach to understanding how public bureaucracies function.

The Napoleonic Tradition

Some features of the administrative system in France predate Napoleon and his framing of the French state. But the Napoleonic model of the state remains a crucial means of understanding public administration in France. For example, the emphasis on law as the foundation of administration and of accountability can be seen as Napoleonic. Likewise, although the French state has become more decentralized, the emphasis on uniformity and control from Paris still survives to some extent. That centralization also is related to the relatively weak connections of the French state with social actors, especially when compared to other European countries. As well as serving as the foundation for French administration the Napoleonic model has been dispersed to other countries in Europe such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. The legal foundations of the Napoleonic tradition have made it resistant to many contemporary reforms in the public sector, notably those based on New Public Management.