This is an attempt to explain why efforts to reform the Brazilian civil service have gone wrong. The author has interviewed public administrators and studied theoretical writings of the past twenty-five years. He finds that the goals and methods of public administration in Brazil derive from European juridical tradition or from out-of-date North American theorists, and that the administrators themselves are unable to come to grips with the reality of polities or with the requirements of economic and social development.
Graham’s explanations are interesting. He shows that civil service reform accumulated enemies because of its origins in Vargas’ personal superministry, the DASP (Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público). There the mandarins of the upper bureaucracy cultivated a chilling Weberian ideology that justified their own position of power as much as it exalted a neutral objective of efficiency. Every president since 1945 continued to use civil service reform, furthermore, as a disguise for executive discretion. As a result, the merit system has always seemed elitist, centralist, and arbitrary to lower bureaucrats and to politicians in general.
Political patronage has been a much more formidable problem. Graham sees it as a relatively new phenomenon. Before 1937 the bureaucracy was small and provided places for the downwardly mobile. Since 1945, at any rate up to the coup of 1964, the public trough had to accommodate a new group elbowing its way upward with the aid of populist or labor-machine parties. For the well-educated scions of decadent oligarchies a written examination posed no obstacle, but the white collar arrivistes had to be granted mass dispensations.
The predominance of the spoils system does not dismay Graham, partly because he sees it as a way of “integrating” a mass society, a social objective more important than economy and efficiency. He also thinks that at this stage patronage is essential to the operation of an open political system, a fact understood thoroughly only by Kubitschek, who managed to combine political deals with development goals. Graham considers the maintenance of a liberal democracy as important as social integration, not for inadmissable subjective reasons—so he would have us believe—but because only that “style” of government generates the feedback needed to control effectively a political system undergoing rapid transformation.
Other problems are taken into account, but only in passing How can the bureaucrats already hired be trained to look upon their sinecures as real jobs! How can incompetent personnel be directed to administer a merit system for the hiring and training of others? The simple fact of size and inertia makes civil service reform at this late date a staggering undertaking. Graham insists on a clear understanding of the social and political system that shapes the bureaucracy because he wants to see the training of public administrators improved. Nevertheless these considerations make civil service reform appear to be just another lever without a fulcrum in the workshop of the developmentalists.
