Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 17th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview III. Working Group on Civil Service Author(s) Kaja Gadowska Jagiellonian University Krakow Poland Title Law in action. The problem of political patronage in the process of appointing high-rank posts in civil service in Poland File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Civil service is one of the key elements of government administration and exerts fundamental impact on functioning of the state. Nevertheless, public administration in post-communist states is particularly vulnerable to political patronage and cronyism, due to unequal statutes of political and administrative spheres and underdevelopment of professional civil service. Politicians try to extend their control of personnel policy into the public administration. Senior positions in the administration are regarded as political spoils. Consequently, administrative autonomy is seriously undermined. In my paper I will try to identify the sources of malfunction in the politico-administrative relations in Poland e.g. communist legacy, supremacy of particularistic values within national culture and ascendancy of parliament over the administration, in consequence of which politicians tend to abuse their offices in order to exert pressure on the administration. The aim of the paper is to assess to what extent the actual relation between politics and administration reflects the principles contained in the 1996 and 1998 Civil Service Acts and the presently in force 2006 Act on Civil Service and the one on the State Staffing Pool and High-rank State Posts. Special attention will be dedicated to identifying the practices of subsequent governments aimed at delaying the civil service development and adopting temporary measures, in form of Amendments to Civil Service Act, which would create loopholes for the politicization of administration. I am going to concentrate on the policy towards senior positions in public administration, especially of directors general in ministries, other central institutions and regional offices as these positions are critical to gain and preserve direct control over civil service by politicians. I will argue that the most significant negative feature hindering the development of a professional civil service and its stability has been a wide-scale practice of employing in senior positions in public administration political appointees. Patron-client relations between politics and administration violate the separation of state’s constituent components and their respective areas of operation.
