Public Administration Public Personnel Administration Essay

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A great coalition of smaller firms aimed to defeat patronage and create an acceptable, predictable, regulatory environment; in other words, a credible commitment mechanism was needed, and politicians could supply this. This confluence of monitoring problem, change in political parties, and demand for security led to demand for a merit system that would offer legal security via impartial public agents, and that was less vulnerable to political manipulation (Shepherd, 2003).

Public administration is made up of two levels. One level consists of the political directorates like cabinets, councils and advisory bodies. Members of the political directorate may be elected, co-opted, nominated by interested groups or selected by some other means. The political directorate may also include members from the military or civil services. The other level comprises permanent career officials and bureaucratic organizations. Civil servants are supposed to be selected on merit, and spend their whole careers in the civil service subject to acceptable performance. In theory, both civil service impartiality and the policy-administration dichotomy highlight the role differentiation between the members of political directorates and the career services. In practice, there is a close connection between political directorates and civil servants within the executive branch (Rethinking Public Administration: An Overview, n.d.).

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The result is a smudging of the division between political and administrative roles, particularly at the senior levels. Political directorates regularly introduce their supporters in the career services through lateral entry or special programs. Civil servants, under pressure, enticement or aspiration may become agreeable to partisan political actions. Tendencies toward the politicization of the civil service can occur with each transition in political leadership (Rethinking Public Administration: An Overview, n.d.).

Merit pay has had a long history in the U.S. civil service. Graduated pay systems were introduced in the federal civil service shortly after passage of the Pendleton Act. Step-in-grade systems enjoyed widespread popularity among all levels of government until the 1970s when they came under increasing attack. They were criticized for being automatic and for failing to differentiate employee rewards based upon performance. These shortcomings led to a search for alternatives that resulted in the merit pay provisions of the federal Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and similar reforms in a variety of states and localities (Perry, 1986)......

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