Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Richard Ostrofsky
(December, 2000)
In this article, the third of a series,1 I want to discuss another myth of
democratic government as understood at present: that civil servants are and
ought to be no more than obedient instruments of their political masters.
The factual part of this assertion is simply false. As much as public service
“functionaries” may pretend to their superiors, to their publics and even to
themselves that they are just following the rules, just obeying orders, this
front need not be taken seriously. They may be cogs in a vast machine but
they remain capable of all the motives and manoeuvres that humans display.
They bend or stretch their orders, and drag their feet when it suits them (as
we all do). And they work strictly by the book – following the rule that
gives them their preference while overlooking the rule that forbids it.
Civil servants are known to do all these things, and no amount of
auditing can prevent it altogether, though it can and does make self-
interested behaviour more subtle, more difficult and correspondingly, harder
to detect. Rather, it is the second, evaluative part of the assertion that that I
want to dispute here: It is wrong of us to expect or hope that civil servants
will be passive instruments of political and judicial power that lies
elsewhere. The idea of democracy requires that civil servants be held
accountable – rather than strictly submissive – to law and to the public will
and interest. On no account do we want an autonomous civil service
holding supreme power – as happened, for example, in the former Soviet
Union. (Russian communism was more the sovereignty of a bureaucracy
than the dictatorship of a proletariat.) Still, we might be better and more
democratically governed if our civil servants were held accountable more
firmly, but also more loosely and flexibly than is the case at present, and it
is that possibility I wish to consider.
Whether explicitly as in the American system, or implicitly as here in
Canada, today we recognize government as having three distinct functional
components: legislative, judicial and executive. Elected representatives