The Merit Principle in a Representative Bureaucracy: Belfast

Abstract

Interest in recruitment to the public administration is not new and can be found in the classic writings of Hegel and Weber, but it is Kingsley’s representative bureaucracy (1944) that guides this research. Recruitment in less contested societies has aimed at increasing diversification, developing various mechanisms for attaining a more ‘representative bureaucracy’ — guaranteed interview schemes, outreach programmes, equal opportunity legislation etc. In contested societies a mechanism often employed to achieve such a result is that of community quotas (see Belgium, Nigeria and Lebanon as examples). The merit principle is often the first sacrifice of power-sharing arrangements, being replaced with simple quota systems of recruitment. The former out-group feels this to be a necessary requirement to guarantee sufficient representation within the bureaucracy. In this chapter this assumption is challenged, investigating the hypothesis that proportional (passive) representation within the administration can be attained without forgoing the merit principle. A review of the literature on public administration within the contested society in Chapter 1 indicated two emerging schools of thought on the concept of passive representation. Both schools concur on the necessity for the bureaucracy to possess legitimacy — for one however this is derived from actual representation within the bureaucracy, for the other legitimacy is derived from equity of opportunity.