The Benefits of High Turnover of Bureaucrats

Spring 2011 started and last night we talked about the role of organizations in the context of public administration.

There was a brief discussion on the reasons for organizations to exist followed by a presentation and a group activity concerning the boundaries of organizations.

Honestly, I paid less attention to the description of boundaries like mission, resources, capacity, responsibility, and accountability than to an observation made by a faculty who said that once Abraham Lincoln took office the elected president replaced over 90 per cent of public servants with political appointees.

This observation was made in the context of a discussion over bureaucracy as a pool of standardized procedures aiming the effective implementation of policies as well as the Weberian conflict between political appointees and bureaucrats.

At first, I thought that this high turnover may jeopardize the continuity of important policies. As many people leave office there would remain only few ones with enough expertise to carry on tasks that have proven to be successful for the common good.

After considering the risks, though, I began pondering on the possible advantages of a deliberate high turnover of personnel in public organizations.

Assuming that transparency is increasingly dominant in public arenas, that organizations’ structure and regulations facilitate the mechanisms of check and balance by constituents, and that key servants are maintained in their positions during transition periods, my understanding is that whenever an elected official takes office and decides to substitute a large number of senior staff and other lower ranks for newcomers, higher are the possibilities of bringing about benefits such as technological and procedural innovations, the reinforcement of democratic values, increasingly public participation in political processes, establishment of a healthy competitive environment, and the provision of more accountability to taxpayers.

In addition, assuming that principles, not rules, must drive public organizations and that objectives are permanent but means adaptable, and public representatives are committed to the common good not to procedures, staff high turnover becomes a positive change because it i) creates a productive sense of uncertainty in public arenas, thereby propelling public administrators to excel in daily activities iv) attracts new ideas to time-consuming and costly procedures v) accelerates policy-making processes vi) prevents the formation of “guerrillas employees” vii) strives to secure the clarity of existing procedural rules and appropriate behavior viii) challenges deep-rooted institutional beliefs and assumptions xix) facilitates the process of adaptation to contemporary issues x) expands the number of constituents interested in actively participate in policy and decision-making in public realms and finally xi) combats cronyism, patronage, corruption.

The average citizen today is more educated, information travels much faster, and rules and policies can be quickly understood and implemented by a larger number of people than in the 19th century. Considering the current scenario, the high turnover of public servants after elections does not necessarily mean discontinuity of successful policies or higher costs in training but continuation of constitutional principles as well as procedural innovation deriving from policies that allocate the best possible way scarce public resources.