The dilemma for revolutionary government

Sometime after the first EDSA a group of Filipino journalists which included Amando Doronila and myself were invited to visit Warsaw. To me it was a welcome invitation to verify the forces that led to two people power revolutions in the Philippines and Poland.

In Manila we still hailed Lech Walesa as we did Cory Aquino. Walesa led workers to seize control of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to protest, among other things, a recent rise in food prices. He managed to scale the shipyard gate to join the workers inside. A charismatic leader he was able to convince workers in 20 other factories to join the strike in solidarity. The Polish revolutionary movement became known as Solidarity.

To our surprise when we reached Warsaw the Poles were disenchanted with Walesa. I spoke to one of our guides and he told me Walesa may have been a charismatic revolutionary but he was unable to set up a new government. He realized it was different to revolt and set up a new government for the reforms envisioned. Walesa handled it so badly he appointed even his driver to a high office in government. I am using this as an example of one of the most difficult dilemmas of government to set up a new one after the old. It was true of Poland and many other countries. The decision made by wiser comrades of Walesa took the offensive and offered a solution. The guide said officials of the past regime were retained for a while as they prepared  likely candidates who could take over in time.  I did not follow up if this solution worked.

But recently we have had a spate of removing corrupt officials. The PCSO for one and the Bureau of Customs for another.

One journalist said it had to do with the system. I agree and so did the Constitution Committee  during Arroyo’s time. We will always have corruption but less of wholesale corruption if we bring down the cost of winning elections.

We opted for a parliamentary system as a way to tackle wholesale corruption. Instead of a President and senators elected nationwide as it is in a presidential system, we need small constituencies and a party system to elect a prime minister. It also solves the problem of getting results quickly (even on the day itself as India’s parliamentary system does) despite its millions of political illiterates. The people still get to elect the leader as prime minister when they vote for his party. It has to be explained.

Problem of revolutionary governments  to change the entire bureaucracy in one swoop or just slowly discard those who were in the previous government. In the parliamentary government in Britain there is a permanent civil service with members appointed through merits and its own rules for removal and requirement differently from our system which depends on political leaders in power.

The British system is an example of another solution with  branches of public service. Government employees get positions  on the basis of competitive examinations, rather than by political patronage.

In this system it is about political appointees vs. career civil servants.

In a paper written by a panel headed by Pablo T. Spiller and a Santiago Urbiztondo, the paper analyzes a multi-period delegation model with two principals and an agent. The purpose of the model is to explore the determinants of civil service structure, in particular, the use of political appointees (short lived agents) vs. civil servants (long lived agents).

We see this process as a bargaining problem between two principals, Congress, a long lived principal, and the President, a short lived one. Our model is consistent with three aspects of the US Civil Service: its evolution during this century, the high proportion of political appointees in the higher civil service with respect to its counterparts in occidental democracies with parliamentary systems, and the different scope of civil service coverage in local governments in the United States.

We argue that these differences in the organization of civil services across countries and over time can be understood as the result of a game among multiple principals for the control of the bureaucracy, with the main determinants being the extent by which the legislative and executive bodies are aligned in their interests, who is politically more powerful, whether they have different political horizons, and to what extent political parties control their representatives at both the executive and legislative bodies. We model this interaction by letting the principals have different horizons.

One principal lives through the entire game and faces a series of short lived principals. The emphasis of the model is on the choice of the agent, who can be either short or long lived.

The civil service are the public officials who advise and assist Government Ministers in the running of their departments. The Constitution does not mention the civil service but it is vital to the functioning of the state. The civil service has three main functions: It advises the government on policy.

The civil service has three main functions:

· It advises the government on policy

· It helps prepare and draft new legislation and

· It helps the government to run the country according to the legislation passed by the Oireachtas.

Each Department of State has a permanent staff consisting of administrative, professional, specialist and technical employees. The head civil servant of each department is the secretary general, who is recommended by the Minister for that Department and appointed for a period of seven years by the government. Below the secretary general, there are a number of assistant secretaries, who are each responsible for specific areas of work in the department. Below the assistant secretaries, there are many officials at varying levels of seniority.

The abstract melds the two systems of civil service as a career in a parliamentary system and appointees in the presidential system. It will take time to accomplish this ideal proposed to the EU but the drug problem will persist if politicians depend on them for their money to buy elections.