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The Higher Civil Service in Britain
... This is in part a result of the fact that political executives in Germany do not have large personal staffs and must rely on the civil servants for help. 173 Questions can also be raised about the imprecision of the concept of patronage, and it has been noted that there is little empirical evidence for many of the general complaints made about patronage. 174 Where evidence does exist about federal-and Land-level patronage, it applies above all to the highest civil service levels which consist largely of so-called "political officials" (politische Beamte) who are mostly career civil servants who occupy key positions and may be forced to accept temporary retirement for political reasons; however, only a small minority of about 10 percent are actually dismissed. ...
Administrative counselling (AC) is a unique feature of Japan’s public sector. Comparable to a decentralised “shop front” ombudsman function, AC may serve to lift public confidence in administrative actions. This paper analyses AC as a contributor to program evaluation at a time when Japan’s public sector is in crisis and probably at a turning point in its history. A central question is whether AC can help the Japanese public sector to respond to increasing criticism of its performance and structures. AC deals with a large number of cases annually and so holds the potential to restore public confidence in the public sector. Aggregation of the patterns of complaint behind the AC cases can also be an effective diagnostic tool for the direction of program evaluation resources. The voluntary nature of AC and its reliance on the efforts of citizens of social standing may mean that it is not capable of implementation outside of Japan. While implementation of AC in non-Japanese public sectors would require significant cultural shift it is nevertheless worthy of further analysis.
There have been some public sector changes in Japan, especially since 1981. The changes have contributed to the country's outstanding economic development. Recent events, however, question whether these changes have been sufficient and whether the sector is meeting the needs of Japanese society today.
Many of Japan's political, economic and social certainties disappeared in the 1990s including automatic economic growth and the 38 year reign of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party government. These developments and events such as the Kobe earthquake, the HIV blood contamination scandal and the collapse of financial institutions suggest that a more fundamental reform of the public sector is still required.
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