Following consecutive defeats at the polls for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and ahead of year-end elections for the five special municipalities, calls for a Cabinet reshuffle have been getting louder. The focus of any reshuffle, however, should not be on which individuals, but on what kind of person should be chosen to serve.
Under the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), as with that of his predecessor, Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), successive Cabinets have been composed mostly of career civil servants transferred to political posts, and this is probably one of the main reasons why governments have achieved so little over the past decade.
Democratic systems of government can basically be divided into two types — Cabinet and presidential systems. In a country with a Cabinet system, the premier is always a member of parliament, never a civil servant. Taking the US as an example of a presidential system, the country’s more than 10,000 political appointees are chosen through election campaign teams and among prominent people who share the administration’s ideals. Even when, on occasion, a civil servant is appointed, that person must first sever connections with the civil service by resigning from their post.
Practice has shown that keeping political appointees and career civil servants in separate streams is a necessary division of labor, and the advantages of doing so are quite clear.
First, only members of a president or premier’s political team can really understand their leader’s ideology and policy orientation. Only they can get down to implementing a new government’s policies as soon as their candidate takes office, without needing an induction or exhortations from the premier.
Second, only if the civil service can be made to accept political direction can civil servants be neutral, as they should be, instead of harboring dreams of being promoted to minister. In Taiwan, in the run-up to every presidential election, ambitious senior civil servants will bet on a win by the pan-blue or pan-green camp, taking leave of their neutrality. That is the unfortunate result of transferring civil servants to ministerial posts.
Taking Taiwan’s first rotation of political power as the starting point, it has only been a decade since we bade farewell to authoritarian rule. In the past, we were used to the idea of a Cabinet of technocrats. What that meant in practice was that, under the KMT party-state apparatus, the KMT used the civil service as a resource to foster party members for its own purposes. Not only was party membership a condition for advancement but, as in communist countries, an official would have to serve as party secretary for a particular department in order to head it. Such a distortion of the constitutional system is not a normal state of affairs.
However, after Chen became president, the KMT and many media commentators took the view that members of election teams who were appointed to political posts were being rewarded for services rendered, and they called on the president to respect so-called expertise. This led to senior career civil servants being appointed to most ministerial and vice-ministerial posts. The sanctimonious demands made by politicians and pundits distorted democratic principles and were tailored to fit the ambitions of civil servants who hoped to be transferred to political posts. Take the job of defense minister, for example. Aside from professional soldiers, the only other people with relevant arms expertise are police officers and gangsters. If military expertise is really required for the post, why do advanced democracies have civilian defense ministers?
Looking back at the innumerable people who have served in political posts over the past decade, only a handful have achieved anything. Chen Ding-nan (陳定南), Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), Lin Hsin-i (林信義) and Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), who served as ministers of justice, the environment, economics and the interior respectively, are probably the few talented exceptions who prove the rule, and their backgrounds are mostly of prominent service in election campaigns, business or academia.
In contrast, most ministers who were transferred from civil service posts remained anonymous to the general public. There is a reason for that. A democracy calls for civil servants to carry out policy according to the law, and their reward for doing so is continued employment throughout their careers. These job specifications are completely different from those of a political appointee.
What civil servants fear most is that charges or accusations of misconduct could affect their prospects for retiring on a civil service pension, and their banes are the legislature and the Control Yuan.
For political appointees, on the other hand, the mission is to make good on election promises, so what they fear most is public opinion and district courts. Political appointees emphasize innovation and reform, while civil servants are responsible for putting these policies into practice. While political appointees strive to achieve, it is enough for civil servants not to make mistakes. That is how things should be in a real democracy.
During the eight years of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) rule, DPP supporters often asked how it was different from the KMT. Now that Ma is president, people have noticed that his KMT administration is not much different from that of the DPP, either. As long as each Cabinet reshuffle involves many civil servants getting promoted to ministerial positions, replacing individuals but not changing the system, then we will not see much in the way of policy achievements. Even on the rare occasion that they do achieve something, it is sure to be the result of the party apparatus and civil service acting in perfect collusion. In other words, the restoration of the old party-state apparatus — and that would not be good news for Taiwan.
As Ma prepares for the next Cabinet reshuffle, he should change track and start appointing people other than civil servants. Such a change would cut the time needed for Cabinet members to settle down in their new jobs, and it would also let Taiwan’s civil servants stick to their proper neutral role.
Cheng Yun-peng is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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