Session 16: Yes Minister!

A discussion on bureaucracies reminded me of a popular British satirical sitcom ‘Yes Minister’ and its sequel ‘Yes Prime Minister.’ The show, aired on BBC between 1980 and 1988, focused on the dynamics of interaction between the elected representative of British government and their civil service aids. As reflected in the title of the series, the relationship between the Minister and his Permanent Secretary is depicted as one where the bureaucrats are frequently found apparently agreeing with and accepting the instructions of their ‘political master’ while practically ensuring that their objectives in terms of ensuring policy direction and status-quo maintenance are met without the realization of the MP, Jim Hacker.

It further reminded me of a conversation with a former LUMS MBA faculty member who worked with the Punjab government on The Punjab Information Technology Board. The former professor claimed that in order to achieve any task or meet any objective while working with the government, he necessarily had to employ certain unorthodox means and exploit certain loopholes and abandon ‘by the book’ methods which often blurred the lines of legality. He claimed that if this approach was not adopted, given the blockages placed by the bureaucracy, no project could be completed and no results would be achieved.

These are interesting dynamics, which prompt thoughts in several directions: the relative power of non-elected civil servants and electable government representatives, the differences in the permanency of their positions, and the extent to which civil servants and bureaucracies comprised of them are politically motivated and carry exogenous objectives.  

In systems like that of Pakistan and England, where governments inherit a civil service and do not bring the top brass of the bureaucratic structure into office with their election (as is the case in the United States), politicians are faced with a well experienced and polished group of individuals that has been doing its job for far longer than the elected representative and hence is much more skilled at achieving its objectives and mitigating opposition. In such a scenario, where the civil service carries one of the two characteristics (political motivations or an exogenous nature wherein it carries its own objectives separate from that of the government), it can be expected that the two forces (one of which was meant to carry out tasks at the service and direction of the other) are rubbing against each other and possess different desires. In that scenario, given the permanency of the civil service and the temporary nature of political office holders, the bureaucracy holds a much heavier hand in terms of being able to influence policy in multiple ways (monitoring the exposure to information of the representative, managing the nature of advice and recommendations that the representative gets and manipulating the eventual translation of policy and directions into actual results).

In a way, the bureaucracy acts as a pressure group on the government. However, unlike other pressure groups, it is a pressure group ‘within’ the government and hence carries an immense power to not just influence policy, but to strong-arm it in a particular direction. In many scenarios, as was conveyed in ‘Yes Minister’ and ‘Yes Prime Minister,’ the bureaucracy is the real brains of the government and the determinant of national policy. In such a distressing hypothetical scenario, one wonders with disillusionment about the usefulness of elections and the extent to which the voting into office of political leaders in a scenario where the real power holders are constants and will continue to exploit the arms of the state in a manner such as to benefit their exogenous agenda.