Bureaucratic Neutrality in an Ethnic Federalism:
The Case of Ethiopia
By:
Berhanu Mengistu
Old Dominion University, bmengist@odu.edu
Elizabeth Vogel
Old Dominion University, evogel@odu.edu
Introduction
Throughout history, the creative nature of mankind has generated an array of political systems derived from just a few foundational political structures. As early as 350 BC Aristotle identified four fundamental political structures in the governments of societies: tyranny, fascism, democracy and oligarchy. Modern day ideologies, including the various types of socialism, communism, and capitalism are political economy interpretations of these same themes. Historical underpinnings, especially religious ones, can also provide contextual differences for these political economy structures. Regardless of the ideological orientation, however, all governing structures share a central operating element that conditions the successful implementation of policy and continuity of governance, namely bureaucracy. Repeated efforts to operationalize the term bureaucracy have been made by social theorists from John Stuart Mill, Weber, Marx, Lenin, and Michels, through modern day public administration theorists. In spite of the claim that Weber was the first to popularize the concept of bureaucracy, the idea is at least as old as the biblical account of the division of labor by Moses based on the counsel of his father-in-law, suggesting that the idea of division of labor is a prerequisite to the efficient implementation of a task. In current management literature the multisided meanings of bureaucracy embrace administrative personnel, organizational types, and negative and polemic meanings of current trends in modern government such as red tape, redundancy, and decision-making gridlock. (Abrahamsson, 1979).
In this paper bureaucracy refers to the executive arm of any government regardless of political orientation such as capitalism, socialism, communism, or ethnic federalism, the latest of which is a phenomenon that has come into vogue since the end of the Soviet State. In the context of Ethiopia, the term bureaucracy denotes the members of the civil service, which includes the “’non-political’ or ‘permanent executive’ that is recruited to serve the government in the implementation of policies through the management and conduct of governmental affairs (Meheret & Chanie, 2000) and excludes elected officials, legislators, judiciary, armed forces or federal police (Federal Civil Servants Proclamation No…/2001, Article 2, Section 1).
Leave a Comment