arhiva » Anul 1998 » Numarul 1(1) din 1998
ROMANIAN CIVIL SERVICE – STILL LACKING A REAL MERIT SYSTEM
Civil service is different from one country to another. It can be attractive, having a lot of prestige in country like United Kingdom, France or Japan, or less interesting and with a low prestige. The esteem every civil service has depends on the quality of public employees.
The spoil system was a system that permitted access to public function to people from every social class, from every region. “To the victor go the spoils” system implied massive changes in administration each time the leaders were changed.
Spoils system was very important in building up party strength, government jobs being the way to attract new members and a good motive to sustain party affiliation. Constant changes in bureaucracy led to inefficiency, incompetence, and insecurity for public servants, to patronage and inequity in treatment, to corruption. The spoils system was replaced by the merit system. While spoil system emphasizes on loyalty, merit system stresses on competence. Education, skills, job performance, experience are supposed to be main criteria for recruiting, advancement, retention, not patronage (political payoffs), friendship, kinship.
The merit system is protected by laws and regulations in order to be effective, to assure that employees are protected against political pressures (public servants are often prohibited from engaging in political activities, sometimes even from participation in partisan elections) or clientelist personnel politics. The emphasis on competence makes public service more efficient, bringing more benefits to the people.
