l:href='#ch3_27'>[27] This is also the task with which the NDCs were confronted with in the earlier days of their development.
It is well known that, up to the eighteenth century, open sales of public offices and honours – sometimes with widely-publicized price tags was a common practice in most NDCs. Prior to the extensive bureaucratic reform in Prussia under Frederick William I (1713-40), although offices were not formally sold, they were very often given to those willing to pay the highest amount for the tax that was customarily imposed on the first year’s salary.[28]
Partly because they were openly bought and sold, public offices were formally regarded as private property in many of these countries. In France, for example, it was very difficult to introduce disciplinary measures for bureaucrats until the Third Republic (1873) for this very reason.[29] In Britain, prior to the reform carried out in the early nineteenth century, government ministries were private establishments unaccountable to Parliament, paid their staff by fees rather than salaries, and kept many obsolete offices as sinecures.[30] Associated with the sale of public office was tax farming, which was most widespread in pre-Revolution France but which was also practised in other countries, including Britain and the Netherlands (see section 3.2.5.D for further details).
The ‘spoils’ system, where public offices were allocated to the loyalists of the ruling party, became a key component in American politics from the emergence of the two-party system in 1828 with the election of President Jackson. This got much worse for a few decades after the Civil War.[31] There was a loud cry for civil service reform throughout the nineteenth century to create a professional and non- partisan bureaucracy, but no progress was made until the Pendleton Act of 1883 (see below for further details on the act).[32] Italy and Spain continued the spoils system throughout the nineteenth century.[33]
In addition to the sale of public office, there was widespread nepotism. Although concrete historical data on this is obviously difficult to come by – and whatever data we do have should be interpreted with caution - Armstrong reports that significant proportions of elite administrators in France and Germany had fathers who were top officials themselves, suggesting a significant degree of nepotism.[34] For instance, among the high-ranking bureaucrats of pre-industrial France (the early nineteenth century), about 23 per cent had fathers who served as elite administrators. At the country’s industrial take-off in the mid-nineteenth century, the proportion was still as high as 21 per cent. Corresponding figures for Prussia ,were 31 per cent and 26 per cent respectively.[35] Feuchtwanger argues that, even after the extensive bureaucratic reform under Frederick William I (see below), ‘nepotism was still rife and many offices were virtually hereditary’.[36] In Prussia, competition from educated lower- middle class men was eliminated by changing the entrance requirements, such that by the 1860s, ‘a carefully controlled recruitment process produced an administrative elite including the aristocracy and wealthier middle-class elements’.[37]
With the sales of offices, spoils system and nepotism, it is hardly surprising that professionalism was conspicuously lacking in the bureaucracies of most NDCs at least until the late nineteenth century. The Jacksonians in the USA had a contempt for expert knowledge, and were against the professionalization of the bureaucracy on the grounds that the largest possible number of citizens should be able to participate in the act of government. Even after the 1883 Pendleton Act, which set up the Civil Service Commission to administer competitive recruitment to the federal bureaucracy, only about 10 per cent of civil service jobs were subject to competitive recruitment. Italian bureaucrats in the late nineteenth century had ‘no legal, or even conventional, guarantees on tenure, dismissals, pension, etc., and no recourse to the court’. Until the early twentieth century, civil service careers in Spain were heavily determined by what was known as
It was only through a long-drawn-out process of reform that the bureaucracies in the .NDCs were able to be modernized. The pioneer in this regard was Prussia. An extensive bureaucratic reform was implemented by Frederick William I from 1713, the year of his accession to the throne. The key measures included: the centralization of authorities scattered over two dozen separate territorial entities (many of them not even physically contiguous) and overlapping departments; the transformation of the status of the bureaucrats from private servants of the royal family into servants of the state; regular payments in cash (rather than in kind as before) of adequate salaries; and the introduction of a strict supervision system.[39] Thanks to these measures and to the additional measures introduced by his son, Frederick the Great (1740-86), by the early nineteenth century Prussia could be said to have installed the key elements of a modern (Weberian) bureaucracy – an entrance examination, a hierarchical organization, pension systems, a disciplinary procedure and security of tenure. Other German states such as Bavaria, Baden and Hesse also made important progress along this path during the early nineteenth century.[40]
In Britain, sinecures were eliminated through a series of reforms between 1780 and 1834. Bureaucratic remuneration was changed in the first half of the nineteenth century from a fee-based to a salary system. It was also only around this time that the status of government ministries in Britain was changed from private establishments to government ministries in the modern sense. It was only after 1860 that the British Civil Service was substantially modernized.[41] The USA made some important progress with the professionalization of the bureaucracy in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as the proportion of federal government jobs subject to competitive recruitment rose from 10 per cent in 1883, when the Pendleton Act was introduced, to nearly 50 per cent by 1897.[42]
In the contemporary discourse on ‘good governance’, there is a strong emphasis on a politically independent judiciary administering ‘rule of law’.[43] However, we have to be somewhat careful in embracing this ‘independent judiciary’ rhetoric.
It could be argued that a judiciary with a very high degree of political independence (for example, the German or Japanese judiciary) is not necessarily desirable, as it lacks democratic accountability. This is why some countries elect some of their judicial officials – the best-known examples being the USA today, and the UK in the nineteenth century.[44] In the UK, the boundary between the judiciary and the legislature is also blurred, since its highest judges sit in the House of Lords; however, few people would argue that this is a major problem.
Given this, we need to understand the quality of the judiciary not simply in terms of its political independence, but in a number of dimensions – the professionalism of the judicial officials, the quality of their judgments (not simply from a narrow ‘rule of law’ point of view, but also from a broader societal point of view) and the cost of administering the system.
Like their counterparts in modern-day developing countries, the judiciary in many NDCs suffered from excessive political influence and corruption in appointments (or, where applicable, elections) up to, and often beyond, the late nineteenth century. It was also frequently filled exclusively with men from a narrow, privileged social background with little, if any, training in law, with the result that justice was often dispensed in biased and unprofessional ways.
In the UK, even the anti-corruption laws of 1853-4 and 1883 (see above) did not affect the election of coroners, which was subject to widespread corruption and party political manoeuvring. Elections for county coroners were only abolished in 1888, and it was not until 1926 that professional qualifications for county coroners became compulsory.[45]
During the late nineteenth century Germany made impressive progress towards ‘rule of law’ and by the end of the century had gained a largely independent judiciary. However, there was still a lack of equality before the law, with military and middle-class crimes less diligently brought to court and less severely punished. This problem of ‘class justice’ dogged other NDCs just as badly at this time – including the UK, the USA and France.[46] In Italy, at least until the late nineteenth century, judges did not usually have a background in law and ‘could not protect themselves, let alone anyone else, against political abuses’.[47]
