Spoils in the Caribbean: The Struggle for Merit-Based Civil Service in the Dominican Republic
本文以多米尼加共和国为例，分析为何许多发展中国家难以建立基于功绩的公务员制度，探讨政治分赃制对公共行政的阻碍。
It has been suggested that greatest political contrivance of nineteenth century England was the invention of the nonpolitical civil service.' While this may constitute somewhat of an overstatement, the conventional wisdom in the field of public administration for the past 150 years has been that social, economic, and political development presuppose a politically neutral, career government service based upon the rule of merit. Today, the career civil service represents the triumph of rational public administration over the ancient practice of staffing public offices politically by patronage or spoils. Practically all of the developed nations and a substantial portion of the developing states have enacted merit systems. Although the merit ideal is often questioned and sometimes abused in the United States, it has been a dominant value in national, state, and local government since the federal merit system was adopted more than 100 years ago. Yet, in many developing nations merit-based civil service is a mere shell-a legal formality-with spoils considerations determining entrance, movement within, and dismissal from government jobs at all levels. Moreover, quite a few developing nations continue to eschew even the pretense of nonpolitical, career employment, continuing to function, however poorly, on the basis of open spoils and patronage systems. This paper examines why the merit-based civil service has not gained a firm foothold in many developing nations. The unsuccessful struggle for enactment and implementation of a civil service law in the Dominican Republic is used as a case study. Following a brief political-administrative history of the Dominican Republic, the contemporary struggle for a merit-based civil service is described. The immediate obstacles to passage of requisite legislation are then examined, followed by a discussion of the pros and cons of civil service systems generally. Finally, future prospects for a merit-based civil service in the Dominican Republic are considered.