Civil Service

Characteristics of the Civil Service

Given its autonomous role as described above, the civil service is not simply a series of rules and technical conditions; rather, it should be seen as a type of moral code for public service that is designed to achieve common objectives and should be shared by all its functionaries. Civil services are based on three fundamental values for a democratic public administration, taken principally from the logic of bureaucratic organization proposed by Max Weber: (1) equality, (2) merit, and (3) impartiality. Thus, modern civil services are based on the following:

• 1.
  Recruitment is based on the merits of the civil servants and not on patronage or inherited posts.
• 2.
  The idea of equality allows anyone to participate in the competition to occupy public posts, provided that they meet the prerequisites established for the position in question; and, once they are in the civil service, the system of evaluation and any sanctions should be comparable for all the functionaries.
• 3.
  Impartiality guarantees that the members of the civil service should maintain a neutral position toward political parties, related to an internal logic, to grant all applicants the same opportunities and, when dealing with the public, provide the same attention and quality in the services offered to all citizens regardless of their gender, religion, or partisan preference.

The concept of a career civil service can be given at least two meanings. First, it is used as a synonym of public bureaucracy, although not all the government functionaries necessarily form part of it. The Latin American Center of Administration for Development (CLAD) maintains in the Ibero-American Charter of Public Affairs that, in Ibero-America, the terms public function and civil service are generally used as synonyms. Within this acceptance, there is an enormous variation in the use of the term, since sometimes civil service may in fact consist of any or all functionaries who carry out administrative work within a government. The second use given to the term civil service refers specifically to the area or areas of the government in charge of performing the recruitment and evaluation of the functionaries.

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