Panel on Rewards for High Public Office in Central

Marleen Brans, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

B. Guy Peters, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Email: bgpeters+@pitt.edu

NISPAcee Project Manager:

Viera Wallnerova, Email: wallnerova@nispa.org

In order to govern effectively, the public sector must be able to attract a sufficient number of well-qualified people to fill positions in elective offices, the civil service, and the judiciary. The rewards of high public office--salary, perquisites and more intangible rewards--play a significant role in attracting those employees. That simple statement, however, masks a great deal of complexity in the ways in which governments choose to reward the occupants of high public office. For example, is a high salary really a major incentive for people aspiring to public office, or are there other, more important, factors in recruitment and retention? What role do less tangible benefits of office, such as prestige, security, etc.--play in taking positions in the public sector? How important are immediate benefits versus long-term income and benefits, such as a good pension or continuing perquisites?

The above list of questions could be extended, and they should be addressed both empirically and theoretically in order to understand this aspect of recruitment of elites for the public sector. At an ECPR workshop in 1993 one investigation of the rewards of office was undertaken.[1] A similar exercise was undertaken for seven Asian-Pacific countries in 2003 [2] Although these studies have already been conducted and published, there compelling reasons remain for a second round of research on the topic of rewards of office in Europe. In particular: 1) there have been significant changes in the political environment since the first Workshop; 2) conducting a second round of research will enable us to examine some of the propositions advanced in the first book; and 3) the second Workshop will permit us to build and archive a significant longitudinal data base on rewards.

Several important political changes have occurred since the publication of the initial rewards book in Europe. First, the ideas of the New Public Management have become more pervasive, and more countries are now implementing pay for performance schemes for their public services, and these changes in personnel management may have significant consequences for recruitment and retention of public officials. Also, the civil service is no longer a closed career in many countries, so that government must recruit its employees from a more general labor market than in the past. Second, more "pay-for-ethics" programs have been implemented in order to attempt to control the level of rewards that are available through informal means, especially for elected politicians. Finally, the democratization of Central and Eastern European countries has opened a number of new political systems to this type of research. Not only is there simply a larger number of cases with the addition of these countries, but these cases raise a number of interesting issues for analysis. For example, the low level of rewards offered to public employees in many countries makes corruption more of an issue than in the more affluent European countries studied in the first round.[3]

The first two exercises in studying the rewards for high public office advanced several propositions about the reasons for offering different sets of rewards, and offering them in different ways and at different times. For example, politicians face a number of dilemmas as they decide what principles to use in deciding upon rewards, with the different options having different potential political and economic consequences. Also, we advanced several propositions about the causes of various reward systems. Having a longer time series of data, and especially one which will contain significant institutional and political changes, will permit more adequate testing of these various propositions.

The fundamental question, that was not tested explicitly in the first European Workshop, and only partially in the Asian book, was whether these rewards really affect the capacity of governments to attract "the best and brightest". In particular, have reward systems that now more closely mirror those in the private sector--in both amounts and competitiveness--enabled government to recruit more effectively? Are civil service systems that pay better able to attract better people, or are the rewards (and the costs) of working for government more intrinsic? These questions are important for all these political systems, but are especially important for the newer democracies of Central and Eastern Europe in which the need to build effective governments is confronted with relatively small public budgets and difficulties in paying competitive salaries and benefits.

The data from the first Workshop on rewards were published as an appendix to the book, and that data, along with that to be developed for this project, will be collected, stored, and updated through the Institute for Public Management at the Catholic University of Leuven. The Institute has already committed to managing these data. This data based will be one of several large, comparative data bases on the public sector that are being developed, cataloged, and made accessible through this Institute. This institutionalization of the research will make on-going research on public sector compensation in Europe more feasible for a number of scholars.

Papers and Participants

For this proposed Workshop we will be interested in three types of papers. The highest priority will be for single country studies building on the logic already developed in the earlier studies of rewards. We are interested in replicating the basic logic of the earlier research in countries from Central and Eastern Europe. A second group of papers will be more comparative treatments of rewards, perhaps across levels of government, or perhaps more detailed studies of particular institutions in the public sector that affect the distribution of rewards. Finally, we will be interested in theoretical and analytic papers that develop the foundations for this and future research on this subject.

[1] This research was published as The Rewards at the Top: A Comparative Study of High Public Office (London: Sage, 1994), edited by Christopher Hood and B. Guy Peters.
[2] This research was published as Rewards for High Public Office in Asia (London: Routledge, 2003), Edited by Christopher Hood, B. Guy Peters, with Grace O. M. Lee.
[3] Corruption was, however, a significant issue in several of the Asian countries included in the 2003 book.