Public personnel management and democratization: a view from three Central American republics

Is the success of democratization efforts in developing countries tied to the quality of public administration? Based on an evaluation of three Central American countries (Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica), Donald Klingner claims that democratization and public personnel management are closely related. Although each country's development must be viewed in the light of its own conditions, public personnel management in these countries has evolved through a relatively uniform process, in three stages: (1) political patronage; (2) a transition to merit systems marked by passage of a civil service law, creation of an effective civil service agency, and elaboration of effective personnel policies and procedures; and (3) a dynamic equilibrium among the desirable but contradictory objectives that characterize public personnel management in developed countries. Because this process is essentially similar to the evolution of the field in the United States, it is possible that a general evolutionary model can be developed to predict or explain the relationship between democratization and enhanced public personnel management in developing countries.
The development of stable democratic societies in Central America has been a popular news topic and a primary U.S. foreign policy objective for the past decade. Democratization has been a [...]