CHAPTER ONE

GLOBALIZATION AND GOVERNMENT

Combining Global and Comparative Perspectives upon the State of Modern Government

People today live in a highly interconnected world. Perhaps we can even say a hyper-connected world, because the speed of communication has increased to the point that little happens that is not known on the other side of the globe within minutes, even seconds. There is no shortage of information, and one could very well argue that we are drowning in a deluge of information, making it increasingly difficult to determine what is important and what is not. In this hyper-connected world people are increasingly aware that it is a small world and that it may even be shrinking further. This awareness is perhaps best captured in the concept of globalization, and is most manifest in the interdependence of economies (think of trade, capital and investment movements, multinational corporations), the seemingly accelerating communication exchanges, rapid dissemination of knowledge, increasing managerial and technological innovations, the spread of fast food chains across the globe (e.g., McDonaldization), tourism and the migration of peoples, and the increased use of the English language as the lingua franca for the worlds of government, business, transportation, and education.

However, globalization in its various manifestations has made people also more aware of world-regional, national, and even subnational cultural differences. Globalization has not and—we suspect—will not in the foreseeable future lead to the kind of cultural uniformity some people fear. It is actually because of globalization that people are more protective of what makes them unique as a nation and a culture. Therefore, to understand the world today we need a global perspective next to a comparative perspective. Globalization allows for more comparison, encouraging knowledge in and about different societies. Comparison also reinforces the globalization of knowledge and the manifestation of good ideas that structure good governance.

Yet, much of the literature concerning globalization is focused on economy, communication, and so forth, and it is surprising to see that—as far as we know—there is no study that probes what a global perspective upon government entails. There is ample attention for government in the studies of public administration and political science, but they are limited to providing a comparative perspective and then usually upon a specific group of countries. The systematic comparative study of government started in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries (see Appendix 1), with special attention paid to the structure of legal and political systems. From the second part of the nineteenth century, comparative studies started to focus more and more on substantive policy areas, and that was because governments were increasingly pressed to develop policies in response to the challenges posed by industrialization, urbanization, and rapid population growth. Seeking best practices elsewhere, civil servants looked for experiences from elsewhere. Up to the late twentieth century that comparative perspective served governments and their citizenry well.

In the past 20 to 30 years or so, governments are increasingly confronted with problems that cannot be resolved within their own borders. There are many examples of policies that work far beyond the borders of specific nations. Policy and administration issues become more and more global concerns that require global knowledge and global remedies. This is obvious for such problems as global warming, environmental pollution, and international terrorism. But the case can be made that even policies that are seemingly domestic are influenced by events elsewhere. The member states of the European Union are not the only territories that experience interlocking; the whole world is becoming intertwined, albeit to regionally varying degrees. What is the role and position of governments in their respective societies in the context of a globalizing world? Is globalization changing the structure and functioning of governments, and if so, how? Also, are governments themselves globalizing? There are at least three ways to look at that. First, it is only in the past 60 years or so that governments effectively control the entire landmass of the earth (see Scott, 2009). Second, many governments are members of multiple intergovernmental and supranational (forum) organizations. Third, and posed as a question, could governments be integrating into larger regional bodies, as is happening in the European Union and was predicted—as a general trend of integration—by Norbert Elias (1939)?

In this book we embed the traditional comparative perspectives upon government in a global perspective. We will see that with respect to structural institutional arrangements, governments have been converging toward organizing their territories by means of jurisdictional boundaries from the local up to the national level and governing them through bureaucratic organization. At the same time some of the internal structural arrangements for political order still vary. We will see that governments face comparable policy challenges, but that there are functional differences between these policies. To understand the world in which we now live, it is important that citizens, practitioners, and academicians understand the delicate balancing act between structural arrangements both at a global (jurisdictions and bureaucracy) and domestic level (variation in political-administrative system) on the one hand, and functional (policy) differences on the other. Therefore, we use a method of systematically analyzing a wide range of public policy and administration cases from across the globe to illustrate how modern government is different and similar in many ways. Our selection of public administration, policy, and management challenges from across the globe illustrates what many societies share regardless of geographic location, ethnical structure, or cultural differentiation. The problems, as will be shown, are quite similar, but the actors and the scenes are different and call for modifications in the form of action by policy makers. The balance we all search for is between the policy problem and the suggested explanations and remedies.

The remainder of this book is devoted to analyzing that balance. In this interconnected world it is extremely important to develop a general understanding of the similarities and differences between countries, policies, and organizations. In this book we will do so by presenting examples of government structures, of public organizations, and of policies, and illustrating each of these with examples from various countries. This should enable any reader to analyze her/his own country and its policies and organizations in terms of the examples described.

In this chapter we will first describe the general approach used in this volume, which is the notion that reality can be captured and understood at different levels of abstraction (Section 1). At the most concrete level “reality” is tangible through day-to-day operations and actions. These operations and actions are not random but conducted within a formally and informally circumscribed decision-making arena. Who makes decisions about what? Who has veto power in determining who makes decisions? This constitutes an intermediate level of analysis since that which prompts, guides, influences, and manipulates day-to-day operations and actions is not always tangible. This intermediate level of analysis, i.e., that of rules that bind and actors in decision making, is embedded in a more abstract environment that is made up of the deep-seated values that are shared in a society.

In Section 2 we will briefly “visit” the concept of globalization. It is a very powerful concept in our time, but is it adequately describing what is happening in the world in general, and in the world of governments more specifically? This question is important because there is ample evidence that globalization on the one hand has increased awareness of and desire for localization on the other. Through Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail, people are more interconnected than ever before, but it has made people also more aware of “seeing” and “feeling” what differentiates them from “others.” It is one thing to say that we are citizens of the world, but does that mean that we are less and less citizens in and of a specific, jurisdictionally bounded government?

The statement that people are more interconnected than ever before and, simultaneously, more aware of what separates them from “others” means that we have to consider what globalization means in relation to localization. By habit, people compare, and so do the officials (that is, elected officeholders and civil servants) in their governments. Can we really understand the impact of globalization upon governments without considering how these governments and their citizens approach their domestic and international challenges? We believe it is important, perhaps even vital, to seek understanding of how this trend and phenomenon of globalization still requires comparative understanding. In Section 3 we shall outline why a combined global and comparative perspective is needed in the “world of government” today.

This “world of government” can be conceptualized in various ways. The authors of this volume approach it from their respective backgrounds. Vigoda-Gadot identifies himself as a political scientist and Raadschelders as a public administration scholar. Both the studies of public administration and political science pursue and develop comparative perspectives. Those who identify with the study of public administration seem to focus on policy processes and bureaucratic arrangements in terms of organizational structure, while those who define political science as their academic home sooner consider policy content or substance and bureaucratic arrangements as power structures. As we were developing the content of this book, we acknowledged that administration and policy could not be separated. While there are ample monographs and textbooks in comparative politics, in comparative administration, and in comparative public policy, we felt it important to connect the three (for examples of comparative studies, see Appendices 1 and 2). Politics and administration are but two sides of the same coin. Separating politics from administration and policy is nothing but artificial in contemporary government. It is, thus, that we find it useful to consider why a public administration and political science perspective must be connected (Section 4).

Levels of Analysis and Understanding

With regard to levels of analysis, the distinction made by Larry Kiser and Elinor Ostrom (1982) is very useful in a global and comparative context. They distinguished a constitutional, collective, and operational level of analysis. The constitutional level concerns the foundations of a polity and includes both formal legislation, such as a constitution and legislation emanating from it, as well as primary and secondary legislation, and the values and norms shared in a society (i.e., what constitutes society) (see Lane, 1996). The collective level draws attention to the decision-making arenas of the public realm and includes legislators but also the institutional arrangements that facilitate the participation of stakeholders (that is, citizens, corporate executives, nonprofit groups, interest groups, and so forth) and to the nature of the decision-making processes (hierarchical or networks; iron triangles; issue networks; corporatism). Finally, the operational level concerns the day-to-day operations of government (implementation, service delivery, and so forth). It is amazing to see how often scholars in public administration and political science conceptualize their object of research at these three levels of analysis, even if they do not explicitly refer to Kiser and Ostrom (for 16 examples in various specializations in public administration and political science, see Raadschelders, 2003, pp. 386–387).

Using these three levels of analyses, we depart from the traditional, disciplinary focus on government. The disciplinary structure of academia today, which dates back to nineteenth century Germany, is not useful when attempting to understand a social phenomenon such as government that deals with complex, wicked problems and realities rather than only with simple problems and realities. The study of public administration is an umbrella study under which the partial understandings of the various social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences, in as far as they contribute to knowledge about government in society, can be subsumed. Hence, at the very least we believe that an interdisciplinary approach is much more appropriate (Raadschelders, 2011b, 2011c). At the same time, even an interdisciplinary approach might “suffer” from the constraints set by the parameters of the traditional disciplines. Thus, we opted for a problem-oriented approach and a framework that allows for comparison across continents, nations, levels of government, policies, and time (see Chapter 2). The Kiser and Ostrom framework is neutral, that is, not ethnocentric, and can be applied to analyze the development of society and government on the one hand and the nature of government's interaction, overall structure, and internal processes on the other. To be sure, the disciplines (for instance, political science, anthropology, sociology, economics, history, psychology, and so forth) and the various approaches (for instance, game theory, positivism, phenomenology, critical theory, and so forth) can and do provide valuable insights into the phenomenon of government in society, but it is only in a problem-driven context that we can see and appreciate their contribution to overall understanding.

Globalization

Globalization affects societies in many ways. The literature is vast, but two recent publications provide a good introduction (Mansbach and Rhodes, 2013; Chernotsky and Hobbes, 2013). Economic distress in one country not only spills over into neighboring countries but actually far beyond as the recent economic depression has shown. But globalization in general, and enhanced knowledge of what is happening 10,000 miles away, has also made populations much more aware of national and cultural differences. Against that background governments have to make policies, with the challenge to balance demands from an international/global environment with those of a more domestic nature. At the operational level, then, many governmental challenges can no longer be managed without cross-border and cross-national collaboration.

The technological revolution has had multiple and far-reaching effects upon societies. The impact of technological advancements upon societies has been that the amount of information available is larger than ever, increases quicker than ever, and encourages people to scan information in bits and pieces rather than digest a body of thought carefully (Bohne and others, 2014). We are barely beginning to understand the consequences of the technological revolution at the biochemical level (Carr, 2010), let alone that we understand how these changes in our brain will affect our societal behavior. At the collective level the major influence of technological revolution has been that the “width of social time” (that is, the time it takes for communication between two people) has been reduced to mere seconds. Where public decision makers 100 years ago could take a few days or weeks following a missive to contemplate further ramifications, nowadays e-mail and other communication devices have raised our expectation of quick responses. In the public sector context, though, the quickness of a “tweet” is not necessarily equivalent to quality action. Finally, at the operational level, technology has enabled quick exchanges of best practices between public servants of different countries.

Combining a Global and Comparative Perspective

From the moment that human beings emerged on the globe, they have traveled from one area to another just as any other species. What differentiated human beings from other creatures in the animal world, though, is not only a sense of consciousness of their own mortality, but also a desire to have and to hold what the other owned. From a psychological point of view, comparing is learning. Pretty quickly after the day of birth, an individual compares her/himself to the environment, to other individuals, and to important peers just to say something about themselves and grow, as a result of the learning/comparing process. From a historical point of view, the comparative method became a tool in the hands of the collective to learn and grow. Indeed, tens of thousands of years ago human beings developed a keen sense of property, and this was strengthened when they started to lead a sedentary rather than a nomadic life. These sedentary communities established trade relations, and through these people became aware of the possessions and wealth of others. Unlike animal prides, flocks, herds, and hives, human communities increasingly settled in one space, circumscribing that living space by means of boundaries. Literally, the human inclination to define space as property slowly but surely gobbled up what used to be common land. Human beings enclosed lands to the point that today there is little land left that does not belong to an artificially circumscribed jurisdiction. Humans “flag” their lands with lines in the sands, and they seek to strengthen these lines by any means available.

From very early on, and even from before people became sedentary, human communities have subjugated one another. Human political communities pulsed and throbbed through phases of ascendance and decline, from being subject to another polity, to being the local or regional hegemon, and then back to being subject to another hegemon. It is in this context of rising and declining communities and polities that human beings became comparativists. Most often comparison fueled the desire to have what the other owned, leading to wars of acquisition. As these human communities increasingly defined themselves in terms of polities, they not only sought to acquire each other's possessions, but also copied each other's “best” practices. So, where did this “taking” and copying get the human race?

The answer to this question is both simple and complicated. It is simple when noting that the landmasses of the earth have been enclosed by jurisdictions, save Antarctica. Make no mistake, what started as small, politically circumscribed jurisdictions within an overall and much larger commons has grown to encompass all land as being politically circumscribed. There are no commons left (except local commons governing certain aspects of people's lives). In this landmass, bereft of commons, people as citizens and as political and administrative officeholders in these politically circumscribed jurisdictions still, and for the foreseeable future, look for better practices. That is why a comparative perspective remains useful and important.

However, in this historical time and geographical context it is as important to augment the comparative perspective, so inherent to human beings, with a global perspective. As a species, the human race has circumscribed the landmasses in which it lives into jurisdictions. People today, anywhere, “belong” to a jurisdiction, and they identify with it. These people will always compare their own situation with that of others. It is thus that they have developed comparative perspectives. Such a comparative perspective is sought for reasons of improvement, betterment, acquisition, and enlightenment. Thus far, the comparative perspective sought was systematic. That is, people in general and scholars in particular strived to systematically develop perspectives upon social phenomena that included most similar and most different systems. In this volume we depart from such a systematic comparative approach. In fact, we argue that a systematic comparison only will no longer serve the understanding of government's role and position in society today. Instead, we need to combine global and comparative perspectives.

The global perspective upon governments' role and position in society is one that recognizes convergence toward circumscribed jurisdictions governed through horizontally and vertically organized bureaucracies. The comparative perspective upon governments' role and position in society is one that recognizes cultural differences in policies and policy making. In this book, the elements testifying to convergence, i.e., globalization, of governments are addressed in Chapters 2 to 8; the elements highlighting the differences are displayed in Chapters 9 to 12.

Combining the Studies of Administration and Politics

In governments today politics and administration are very much intertwined. The days are over that governments “lorded” over their respective societies, where governments and the elites in them could rule without too much concern for the populace at large. In terms of political theory, the Atlantic (that is, American and French) Revolutions of the late eighteenth century subjugated—for the first time in history, and at least in theory and in terms of ideal—the governing elite to the people. It may be so that in the practice of governing, i.e., running a society, Robert Michels' “iron law of oligarchy” (1966) is unavoidable, but that practice is countered—at least—by a notion and ideal of (representative) democracy.

People do not compare properties, habits, customs, and so forth, simply to improve their own situation even when at the expense of others. People also compare out of simple curiosity. And that was fine, since historically governments did not provide much more than services that maintained the order and safety in communities through a strong ruler. This ruler was not expected to provide services beyond overall order and safety. For most of history, humankind has relied on rulers providing order and safety and accepted that such could only be possible through taxation in labor or kind and—later—money. However, in the world today humankind relies on governments to not only provide order and safety through military, policing, and judicial services, but also to provide for growth opportunities through welfare and well-being services.

When it comes to comparing habits of governance, people first compared how the relation between rulers and ruled was organized and what it could be. Indeed, the origins of political science go back to ancient Greece, and from the start this included a comparative perspective (see Appendix 1). As government size increased from the sixteenth century on, interest in politics was augmented with attention for administration. The study of comparative administration really took off in the early nineteenth century.

The comparative literature in public administration and in political science is substantial, with the former focusing on bureaucracy and on policy processes while the latter addresses power, the political system, and policy substance. Especially in textbooks, public administration and political science are often treated separately, but one of the best comparative public administration studies is that by Ferrell Heady, and he combined attention to public administration with that of political systems. With Heady we believe that understanding the role and position of government in contemporary societies requires that both administration and politics are included. However, we are also convinced that policy has to be part of that comparative perspective, since that is what administration and politics do: make policy and thus engineer society. The canvas that we attempted to paint in this book is vast, and the literature we have consulted goes far beyond public administration and political science. We have no doubt that literature has been overlooked by us and hope that readers will point out where we are lacking.

Audience for and Structure of This Book

This book is not written as a textbook, although we will not be surprised if many will use it as such. Actually, there are plenty of textbooks available in the areas of comparative administration, comparative public policy, and comparative politics. The comparative politics books often provide a country-by-country discussion using a prescribed template or provide thematic comparisons of policy areas. Comparative administration books generally focus on either bureaucratic structure or the policy process. These books are necessary in any curriculum that advances a comparative perspective and are necessary for anyone who pursues a professional degree in public affairs with an eye on a public sector career. Ours is a different creation, though. We strongly feel that what is missing is a book that provides a rationale for comparative understanding that encompasses the globe. We believe that this book fills that void, and it is, therefore, much more an exploration of and voyage into a combined global and comparative perspective than it is a textbook per se.

That said, what is the audience for this book? Obviously, students of public affairs (whether in public administration, public policy, public management, or political science programs) are a prime target group. We strongly believe that a global and comparative perspective should be part and parcel of any curriculum in public affairs. The time that most politics and policy are domestic is long gone. This book, though, is not only relevant to public affairs students, but actually to any student, whether studying business administration, regional and urban planning, health care management, international and area studies, and so forth. Furthermore, this book will provide useful insights to anyone who works in countries other than that of their citizenship. Hence, employees in multinational corporations, diplomats, and military personnel will find in these pages much that is of interest to them. In the hyper-connected world in which we live, and where individual lives at the local level are directly influenced by events and developments far away, every citizen profits from a global and comparative perspective upon the world that goes beyond the stereotypical understandings that are generated by the bullet-point—breaking!—news and information format of today. To understand who we are and how we came to be, we need knowledge of our specific geographical and historical location, and that cannot be done without a comparative perspective.

This book is divided into 13 chapters. General observations and a conceptual framework have been outlined in this chapter. Chapters 2 to 12 have been organized in two parts. In Part I, Chapters 2 to 8, we describe and analyze the origin, development, and dissemination of government all over the world. In Chapter 2 we describe the origins of government, governance, and public administration, while in Chapter 3 we analyze the long trend toward territorialization and bureaucratization of governments across the globe. Chapters 2 and 3 serve as the background for Chapter 4, in which we discuss state-making, nation-building, and the changing nature of citizenship. In each of these chapters we will provide illustrations from various countries.

Next come several chapters that concern the internal structure of government. First, in Chapter 5 we discuss the institutional superstructure of governments, including: types of political systems (e.g., traditional, authoritarian, democratic; presidential–parliamentary; unitary–federal), balance and division of power from the national down to the local levels, the nature of central–local or intergovernmental relations, and multilevel government. Bureaucracy is a vital component of that political superstructure, so we will pay attention to it in Chapter 6. There are no countries in the world where the public sector is not organized as a bureaucracy, so in terms of structure the similarities between countries are striking. How they function, though, varies with culture and thus we will also pay attention to differences in bureaucratic cultures. Following the chapters that focus on constitutional (Chapter 5) and collective levels (Chapter 6), we need to pay attention to the operational level of organization and management (Chapter 7), including organizational technology, communication, organizational behavior, and organizational change and reform. We pay separate attention to another element that we regard as operational in nature and that involves the nature of political-administrative relations and the practice of human resource management (Chapter 8).

In Chapters 9 to 12 we address issues, policies, and services that are directly visible to any citizen. We picked 33 countries and added two American states (California and Wisconsin) as well as the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council. These chapters do not explicitly offer a systematic comparative perspective. Instead we picked countries from every continent, discuss one policy area for each country, and show that countries face comparable challenges. In two chapters we discuss the traditional government functions, activities, and policies of defense, policy, and judiciary (Chapter 9) and of taxation, revenue, and expenditure (Chapter 10). Governments throughout history have also, but to varying degree, been involved in economic policy, so we discuss industry and trade, planning and zoning, and—a rather recent complement to economic policies—energy management (Chapter 11). Finally, we discuss the welfare services of government with special attention for health care, education, and social services (Chapter 12). In the final Chapter 13 we will revisit the need for a comparative perspective in a world that is getting both smaller and bigger. More specifically to public affairs, we will reflect upon how the combined global and comparative perspectives help the studies of public administration and political science reach beyond the traditional national orientations.

Concluding Remarks: “Flying” and Comparing across the Globe

Before the Second World War, public administration scholars strived for a genuine science of administration based on the idea that there had to be principles that govern arrangements for human associations of any kind (Dahl, 1947, p. 4). The result had to be a grand theory in the tradition of (for instance) Auguste Comte and Karl Marx. Focused on the interaction of social structures and processes as a whole, the problem with “grand theories” is that they are very difficult to test without breaking them into their constituent components (Van Wart and Cayer, 1990, p. 247, note 13). Middle-range theory is more modest in its pretensions, since it only ( ! ) concerns one phenomenon. Barrington Moore's study (1993/1966) of trajectories toward dictatorship and democracy is an example of such a middle-range theory. Many middle-range theories are based on the idea that social development converges toward a particular end-state. To give a few examples: Joseph Schumpeter (1996) on the inevitability of the rise of the socialist state, Francis Fukuyama (1992) on the development toward liberal and capitalistic democracies, and Henry Jacoby on bureaucratization (1976).

However impressive these studies may be, the idea of converging social phenomena is just an assumption—no more, no less. It can neither be proven nor falsified; it is just a starting point and a focus for analysis. It is a rather attractive assumption, as it accommodates the wish to predict. But, as the Arab saying goes, to predict is difficult especially with regard to the future. Another conclusion that can also be drawn from a long list of social scientific research is that, thus far, we have only very limited capabilities to predict human behavior on the individual level, nor are our chances to make adequate predictions for the collective level that impressive. One should be careful therefore with studies such as those mentioned earlier, in which systematic cross-national, cross-time, cross-policy, and sometimes even cross-level comparisons (see Appendix 2 for these four; Peters, 1988) are used to extrapolate into the future. The best that comparative perspectives can offer is an awareness of the differences and similarities of contemporary governments in their respective societies. Cognizant of the similarities and differences between societies and their governments, Pjotr Sztompka remarked that:

The only reasonable explanation of the divergences of meanings in an otherwise convergent—globalised and internationalised—world is the history of past divergencies; the varieties and peculiarities of unique chains of historical tradition. (1990:56)

Sztompka's observation urges us to connect the comparative and global perspectives with both focusing on similarities and differences. What makes the global perspective different is that it takes the entire world into regard and not one specific region or policy area. It is from that global perspective that we can see “government” emerge in sedentary communities and slowly spreading to all continents, to the point that almost the entire landmass of the world is part of a politically defined community. We develop that global perspective by inviting the reader to “fly” and compare across the globe. In Chapters 2 to 4 we will look at the origins and development of government, seeing it emerge in different parts of the globe and developing in a remarkably similar manner; that is, by controlling the land through territorial circumscription and bureaucratic organization. It is in this sense that convergence is very much part of the historical tradition. At the same time, as Sztompka noted, there were and still are divergencies, and these will be explored in terms of the overall institutional arrangements of the political-administrative system in Chapters 5 to 8. Chapters 2 to 8 are written at “cruising” altitude: We simply look at the whole world. In Chapters 9 to 12 we “nose” down into countries and policies, and this will make us aware of the extent to which governments face comparable challenges yet resolve these in different ways. We hope you will enjoy this global and comparative voyage and fly to learn how similar yet different governments are.