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The Clash Between Formalism and Reality in the Brazilian Civil Service

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The Clash Between Formalism and Reality in the Brazilian Civil Service THE CLASH BETWEEN FORMALISM AND REALITY IN THE BRAZILIAN CIVIL SERVICE By LAWRENCE SHERMAN GRAHAM A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA December, 1965 tmiyjifififP 0F FLORIDA 3 1262 08666 481 9 For Jane ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the following people for assistance in the preparation of this dissertation: Professors Harry Kantor (chairman) , Gladys M. Kammerer, and Harry W. Hutchinson, of the University of Florida, who served as my reading com- mittee; Professors Manning J. Dauer, Frederick H. Hartmann, and Alfred Hower, also of the University of Florida; Pro- fessor Diogo Lordello de Mello, director of the research center at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Professors Edward J. Jones, Jr. (chief of party) and David Mars, members of the University of Southern Calif ornia/AID is I mission in public administration at the Fundacao Getulio Var- gas; Peter D. Bell, of the Ford Foundation, Rio de Janeiro; the secretaries in the offices occupied by the University of Southern California mission at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas — especially Dona Irene — without whose many favors and as- sistance in the scheduling of interviews much of the material gathered here could not have been collected; Arminda de Campos and Gil Vicente Soares, students in the Brazilian School of Public Administration (EBAP) who, as research assistants, de- voted many long hours of work to the compiling of newspaper materials; Mrs. Clarence Singletary, of Daytona Beach, Florida, and my wife, Jane Merrell Graham, for preliminary typing; and Mrs. Margaret McGrade, Department of Psychology and The Ameri- can Journal of Psychology , University of Texas, Austin, for Xll IV final editing and typing. Finally, I should like to express my gratitude to the Department of Health, Education, and Wel- fare for a grant received under the National Defense Education Act which made this study possible. The Winter of Our Discontent (1965) L.S.G. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 1 II. THE SETTING 39 III. THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE MOVEMENT TO REFORM THE CIVIL SERVICE 92 IV. PERSONNEL THEORY 146 V. A MODEL FOR THE STUDY OF THE POLITICAL SYSTEM . 17 8 VI. THE POLITICAL UNDERSTRUCTURE (1945-1964). 199 VII. THE CIVIL SERVICE AND POLITICAL PATRONAGE . 239 VIII. THE GAP BETWEEN NORMS AND REALITIES IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 303 IX. CONFLICTING PERCEPTIONS OF THE NATURE OF THE CIVIL SERVICE 349 X. POLITICS AND ADMINISTRATION 371 BIBLIOGRAPHY 397 APPENDIX 427 LIST OF TABLES Table Page I. Reorganization of the Brazilian Civil Service. 60 II. Legislative Representation by Party 211 III. Presidential Voting Totals 216 IV. Voter Registration (1933, 1934, and 1945). 218 V. Voter Registration (1950 - 1962) 221 VI. Size of the Brazilian Civil Service (1938 - 1960) 252 VII. Positions Filled, Vacant, and Abolished during the Government of Juscelino Kubitschek . 256 VIII. Size of the Brazilian Civil Service According to Administrative Entities (1960) 259 IX. Civil Servants According to Major Categories (Prior to the Classification Law of 1960) . 262 X. Proposed Three-Year Program for the Training of Brazilians in Technical Public Administration 315 Vi CHAPTER I THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Recently a trend has developed within public administra- tion to establish a comparative basis for generalization with- in the discipline and to place the field of comparative ad- ministration within the wider context of comparative political studies. This is, in part, a reflection of a significant movement within the social sciences as a whole which looks toward an integrative approach to man and the environment in which he lives. For some time students of public administra- tion have shown a growing awareness of the inadequacy of traditional approaches and have expressed a need to reach into political science and the other social sciences for new tools and concepts. Several reasons contribute to the rejection by these students of the traditional approach as being inadequate. In general, public administration, as it has developed in the United States, has been too culture-bound by American values and standards, in particular, and western European ones, in general. Legalism and formalism have characterized tradition- al studies to the neglect of the informal and the over-all political, social, economic, and cultural context. This traditional approach has been descriptive and prescriptive rather than analytic and comparative. It has failed to pro- vide useful classifications and indicators. Previous cate- gories have been inadequate — almost totally normative and confusing — and there have been few, if any, concepts or techniques for determining similarities or differences among administrative systems. Consequently, empirical studies, when they have appeared, have often been idiographic and in- capable of generalization. Brazil provides an important chapter in the history of the attempts to reform and modernize administrative systems, rooted in different cultures, with the use of traditional concepts and techniques. This experience in administration is of value not only for Brazil's sister republics in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, but also for other countries experiencing similar developmental problems and dynamic change. Yet Latin America, in particular, has experienced an awakening interest in civil service reform and in the recruitment and training of public employees who are both efficient and dedicated to the public service. It is this interest which makes Brazilian experience since 1930 all the more important for the Latin American area. Brazilian leaders in the public administration field have been trying to impose concepts and techniques borrowed from American public administration for some thirty-five years with the objective of initiating fundamental change in their nation's administrative system. They have attempted to create a "modern" public personnel system which will re- place favoritism and patronage with rational recruitment practices and they have devoted a considerable amount of time, energy, and effort to the operationalization of ideas and techniques borrowed from the economy and efficiency movement xn the United States. But today, when one looks at the func- tional side of the Brazilian system — in spite of many insti- tutional changes and much civil service legislation — one finds that these men have accomplished very little in the way of economy and efficiency, even though these goals have been the two guiding lights of the administrative reform move- ment. Within the public personnel field Brazilian admini- strative specialists have focused their attention since 1936 on the creation of a functioning merit system. Although they have applied the techniques and concepts developed in American public personnel administration to make a merit system operational,, they have given the merit concept a more limited meaning than is to be found in the United States. In American administration, the term "merit" is synonymous with "competence," and it is generally used in a broader context to refer to the whole attempt to recruit, train, and maintain competent civil servants. In contrast, in Brazilian usage it is more often restricted to mean the selection of qualified personnel on the basis of public examination. Granted, in 4 both the United States and Brazil, the objective is the se- lection of competent personnel for the public service, but in Brazil, when the concept is attacked or defended, it is usually done in relation to the administration of public examinations called coneursos . These aonaursos are re- quired for initial entry into the career public service and represent a mixture of American examination techniques with an examination process more akin to the French conoours . In Brazilian experience the goal of a federal civil service staffed exclusively by individuals recruited on the basis of merit (qualification proven by written examination) and competency has remained remote and somewhat unrelated to the needs of a social, political, and economic system in the midst of dynamic change where the problems of achieving an integrated, modern nation-state are paramount. When the requirement of public examination has been enforced, there has been a tendency toward restricting the selection of can- didates for the civil service to those who have had the "proper" education; yet the politician has continued to eye sectors of the public service as a means of establishing a reward system for those who have rendered service either to him as an individual or to his party, while others have con- tinued to think of the public service in terms of traditional sinecures. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze Brazilian experience with the reform of its federal civil service and to demonstrate the interrelationships which have existed be- tween the ideas and concepts on which the reform movement has been based and the political context within which the federal civil service has operated. Such an approach involves three different levels of analysis: the ideational, the idio- graphic, and the nomothetic. At the first level, some at- tempt must be made to define the values existing in Brazilian society at large which have affected the character of the civil service, to establish the values on which Brazil's po- litical institutions are based, and to single out the values which have been
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