尋洋之南。躬耕之境

As Huber, McCarty and Weingast have stated, there is a tension between the roles of autonomous bureaucrats and controlled bureaucrats. This reaction paper is interested in how the “merit system” explains these two different roles. This week of readings tell us multiple means by which presidents and Congress exert their political control over bureaucracy. Among the authors of those readings, Nolan McCarty is probably the only one who is aware of the merit system in America that leads to the type of public bureaucrats who are out of the control of Congress and presidents.

It is probably more interesting to ask why public bureaucrats do not choose to implement policies in light of the instruction of presidents and Congress than to ask how presidents and Congress exert their political control over the bureaucrats. A major answer to the former question is that bureaucrats know how to implement policies better than presidents and Congress.

A major criticism to the notion above is that the policy implementation “autonomously” by public bureaucrats are not representative of the voice of the large constituencies, since those bureaucrats do not get their job through elections. This answer implies the protection of the merit system that allows public bureaucrats to implement policies largely based on their own expertise and ideology.

The argument offered above certainly does not deny the limitations, such as appropriation determined by Congress, on the way bureaucracy implements policies. In democracy like America, bureaucracy significantly takes into account the political opinions of presidents and Congress. Thus, a more precise argument is that public bureaucrats in the merit system instead of spoils system are more likely to get rid of the political influence of Congress and presidents.

Regarding the efficiency of merit system, one argument is that merit system is inefficient once public employees have been employed and then prevented from arbitrary firing. Idle public employees generated by the merit system may result in the unresponsiveness of those employees to the demand of presidents and Congress. Even though the laziness of public employees have been the problem in several countries like Taiwan, Bond, Watson, Smith in their book has statistically shown that this problem should not be a worry in America.

Whether the merit system in America is responsive to the constituency leads to my second point. Barry Weingast in his text is concerned with if bureaucracy has served narrow constituencies rather than large constituencies. His argument suggests an extended point. That is, if a president represents the voice of large constituencies and the members of Congress individually represents the voice of parochial constituencies, then the entire bureaucracy is better under the political control of presidents than of Congress.

An interesting argument in light of this logic thus is that, if the Congress’ political influence on bureaucracy is stronger than the President’s, then the merit system rather than, say, spoils system, should be adopted; because, under the merit system, public employees can independently implement policies based on their expertise and be prevented from the strong political influence of congressmen who are largely concerned with pork barrel benefits rather than the voters at large.