PSG XVII: Sociology of the State: Reforms and Resilience

The study group will not meet at the EGPA Annual Conference in Bucharest, Romania but rather in 2012, in Bergen, Norway

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L’Etat des partis en Europe centrale et orientale

The State of the parties in Central & Eastern Europe

Call for papers

With the support of

The Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Toulouse

& lthe gence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF-bureau de Bucarest)

& French Embassy in Romania

Detailed thematic

The State as an institutional form of political organization, born in the societies of Western Europe between the last years of feudalism and the dawning of the modern era – and then spread around the globe over the recent centuries – remains for now, despite all the predictions about its inevitable «decline», the main ‘trophy’ that political organizations specialized in the competition for the conquest and exercise of political power roles – the «political parties» to make it simple – .are seeking to win Each State, in each society is at the same time, a conglomerate of institutional departments, agencies and public institutions, populated by civil servants and public officials, professionally specialized in the preparation, production, operation, implementation, evaluation of public policy and management of related public services.

The state is thus quite plainly the main political institution of a modern society and the heart of its government – «first and foremost, in everyday life, administration is domination,» as
Max Weber recalls. Therefore, the shapes and nature of  collaboration between political leaders resulting, directly or indirectly, of an election in our current democracies rule of law and public servants or officials appointed by the former, are an object of perpetual controversies in politics, and of considerations in academic life. This is especially the case if one defines, with Jacques Lagroye, in a sociological way – not a legal way – the «government» as the process involving all activities that tend to maintain or modify the social order in a given political society, there are certainly many actors belonging to different social spheres who are de facto involved in those governing interactions (experts, professions, mediators and representatives of organized interest groups, cause support groups, etc.), but we also note that only civil servants inhabiting the administrative sphere share with elected or appointed politicians the characteristic of being professionally specialized in the performance of government activities and to participate de jure or rather ex officio to what Weber called the «administrative branch» of society. This ancient and close association turn political leaders and administrative leaders into partners-adversaries in the business of the daily-repeated claim to exercise legitimate authority on «society» and this raises of course the problem, in singular terms, of the issue of delineation and / but overlapping of their respective spheres of activities.

In fact, the history of the modern State reads as both the institutionalization of specialized political roles and as «the invention of a bureaucracy” which, having stripped its bonds with kingly service – the etymology of “minister was first «servant» of the royal household – was more or less objectified, over the centuries, into a corporation of «servants of the State» and of the Law of the State. This is the «bureaucracy» (in a non-pejorative meaning) of which Max Weber developed the «ideal type» in the late nineteenth century. But if the statutory guarantee of independence of this bureaucracy against those who hold political power has come to constitute a criterion for the existence of «the rule of law», if the partisan practices of patronage in appointments to bureaucratic position leading to a «neo-patrimonial» grab on public offices distributed as «bribes» to friends and allies of the ruling party(ies) were denounced as pathological symptoms of «bad governance» among others, these practices do continue to be, at least in part, observable in most sermonizing major democracies (starting with the United States which has, however mitigated, a traditional “spoil system”). But at the same time and in a dialectical way, the official theory of bureaucracy as well as the
theory of democratic representation, which is now the main source of legitimization of State power, continue to warn our societies against the « technocratic danger «: the emphasis is put on the need for elected leaders to practice the full extent of «political power» and assume the responsibilities involved and, by corollary, the obligation of public servants, be they «senior» officials, to stick ex ante to preparing policy decisions with competence and honesty and, ex-post seeing them through with loyalty and efficiency.

In this case, it is as if our contemporary societies with democratic rule of law practiced a kind of official doublespeak mingling oxymoron and paradox: on one hand, it says that is essential to distinguish the sphere of activities called «political» and the sphere of activities called «administrative» to ensure the independence of public officials in their careers and in their behaviour at work against the disease than would be «politicization». On the other hand, it says just as strongly that the subordination of civil servants to the will of political power
is necessary, under pain of falling into the pathology of «technocracy» and «government by experts». Guarding against this second risk justifies, in most major democracies, that the top of the administrative hierarchy is occupied by «political officers» (politischer beamte in the German sense of the word) who could be removed at any time by the executive government. In the same way, ministers surround themselves with «cabinets» of politicized employees, more or less large depending on the country, but whose comparative studies shows that the objective influence in the production of policy keeps on growing for a quarter of a century everywhere.

To make matters more complicated – and enrich reflections – the injunction to perform conveyed in most OECD countries and the European Union (as elsewhere by spreading and transfer of models) by the administrative reform programs, at work everywhere and more or less declined to accommodate to each local context the precepts and recipes of the “New Public Management», seem to encourage what the German State sociologist Renate Mayntz had called as early as 1980, the «functional welding « of an administrative hierarchy with government and political leaders warned to succeed or fail together to make the State more «effective, efficient and economical» (to echo the famous «three Es») : a new form of
‘functional politicization’ in the sense where the people at top of the public bureaucracy must not remain «neutral experts» in the Weberian sense but are called to show solidarity with political leaders and become personally involved in the success or the failure of public reforms and programs developed in and by the State.

This quick analysis shows that the much-talked about notion of «politicization» of the administrative State is in fact a polysemy to be explored, and leads to thinking and research on a continuum of questions ranging from the very traditional issue of partisan patronage on hiring and career promotion of civil servants, in its more or less brutal shapes or more subtle effects, to the issue of neo-managerial administrative reform programs’ effects in terms of “functional politicization» of senior administrative personnel and leadership. This rich set of questions arising in all modern States, is of particular importance in the community of Central and Eastern Europe States that experienced in the space of two decades a period of emergence from Communism where an undifferentiated one-party state with totalitarian claim ruled, an emergence manifested by a re-differentiation of the State apparatus while many political parties appeared, or re-appeared, in situations of political pluralism of opinions (as well as the underlying interests or even the corruption that follows), all under the high stress of structural adjustment and institutional reforms of the so-called «capacity-building» (still on-going) necessary for the accession process to EU membership. This means that all ingredients are combined in the Central and Eastern Europe States that could be seen as a kind of institutional «laboratory» where it is possible to raise all these issues directly or indirectly linked to the concept of politicization of the State and its public
administrations, with opportunities to identify both commonalities and differences between countries that have sufficiently different trajectories in their national statehood (as defined by Juan Linz), but that are also pretty close by their common and double experience of emergence from State communism and recent membership to the European Union, so the comparison can be as productive as possible.

This Panel, which will mark the establishment by the President of EGPA, Wim van de Donk, of the new Permanent Study Group on “Sociology of the State: Reform & Resilience» will be held in four or five sessions. We wish to bring together, forming a «crescent» from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, reports on national case studies from various countries of the former CEECs from the Baltic States to Romania and Bulgaria to be compared to the French case, and perhaps a few other cases of old member countries, taken as a kind of «control variable» in Western Europe, and more general reflections on the phenomenon offered by the speech of initial framing of this group and comments by Geert Bouckaert, President of the Programme and Research Advisory Committee of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS).
The publication of a collective book is planned for this panel.

How to submit a paper proposal

• The abstracts (in French or English) should include:
• Title of paper
• The argument and contents of the paper
• The research methods used and (if applicable) the empirical data used
• The name, affiliation and contact information of the author(s)

The deadline to submit your abstract is May 1, 2011, by sending an e-mail to the Co-chairs: Prof. Jean-Michel Eymeri Douzans & Aurélien Buffat at the following e-mail addresses:

jean-michel.eymeri-douzans@sciencespo-toulouse.fr

Aurelien.Buffat@unil.ch

The authors will be notified no later than June 1, 2011.
Those authors whose abstracts have been accepted should dispatch their paper to the cochairs as well as to Fabienne Maron (f.maron@iias-iisa.org) by July 31st 2011 at the latest.

Co-chairs