Abstract:
This article examines the diffusion of meritocratic practices as a potential instance of policy transfer by scrutinizing the introduction of open and competitive examinations during the mid-nineteenth century in the British Civil Service. Scholars have argued that British reformers were inspired by meritocratic practices in British-ruled India. In order to assess this claim, we combine qualitative analysis of archival material documenting the interdepartmental debates on meritocratic reforms in the British Home Civil Service as well as in the Indian Civil Service with quantitative analyses of unique data on the implementation of examinations with open competition in British public offices and the India experience of Heads of Departments. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses largely reject the idea that the Indian Civil Service was a key source of inspiration for British merit reforms. While our quantitative analyses show some, albeit weak, evidence, no such evidence was found in the qualitative analysis.
1 INTRODUCTION
An important characteristic of a modern bureaucracy is that civil servants are recruited and promoted based on their skills and merits rather than on the basis of political or other connections (such as friends or relatives) (e.g., Dahlström & Lapuente, 2017; Weber, 1978). One of the chief aims of civil service reforms has therefore been to change patterns of recruitment. While several possible causes of merit reforms have been put forward—such as a changing socio-political environment, which entails increasing demand from the public for reforms, especially the emerging middle classes (e.g., Vogler, 2019a), as well as intensified political competition (e.g., Ruhil & Camões, 2003; Ting et al., 2013) and long-term imperial legacies (e.g., Vogler, 2019b)—the extant literature contains a parallel tendency to maintain that the reformers have often been directly inspired by preceding reforms in other countries.
For example, the American reformers that promoted the Pendleton Act (passed in 1883) are claimed to have been inspired by the British merit reforms that were initiated three decades earlier (Johnson & Libecap, 1994), whereas the British themselves are deemed to have been influenced by the introduction of entry examinations in the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the colonial administration in British India (e.g., Bourne, 1986; Cohen, 1941; Davis, 2006; Ellis, 2013; Gladden, 1967; Grindle, 2012; Osborne, 1994; Roach, 1971; Subramaniam, 1957). In the latter case, the influence is portrayed, on the one hand, as attributable to the personal experiences of individuals who were, first, involved in the colonial administration of India and, thereafter, key to the initiation of merit reforms in Britain and, on the other hand, as the outcome of a more general diffusion of ideas and practices from the ICS to the Home Civil Service—one that was not necessarily tied to individuals who converted their personal experiences into institutional change. In this article, we disprove the claim that such connections were decisive. While we find some evidence that agency heads' past experience of India correlates with the introduction of open competition, the overall finding is that the ICS and the Home Civil Service reforms represent two distinct trajectories.
British colonial rule in India went through a fundamental change in the 1850s. Not merely were open examination and merit introduced as the chief norms for recruiting British civil servants to the ICS, sovereign control over British India was transferred from the East India Company (EIC) to the British Crown, and in particular to the new India Office and the Secretary of State for India (Kaminsky, 1986), after “the Mutiny” in 1857. In Britain, coeval and equally momentous developments, foremost represented by the recommendations of the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report, took place in relation to the recruitment of civil servants. Since the merit reforms in India were introduced in a more comprehensive, unified and decisive manner, many have considered the ICS as the blueprint and testing ground for the gradual changes that were implemented in the Home Civil Service (e.g., Kenny, 2015; Mueller, 1984, p. 197). The facticity of this argument of “inward diffusion” wherein colonial undertakings are said to have impacted on the public administration nationally—that is, what Ssu-yü Têng once described as the “common conviction that the civil service examination was first developed in India and then applied to the Home Service” (Têng, 1943, p. 301)—remains, however, to be properly examined. It is, in other words, necessary to inquire into V. Subramaniam's assertions that “[i]n a sense competition, graduate recruitment and the administrative class are the triple gifts of the Indian Empire to Britain” and that the “[triple] ideal, tried and found workable in India, was taken back to the mother country fully fledged in 1870, when the Northcote-Trevelyan proposals were finally implemented” (Subramaniam, 1957, p. 375, emphasis added).
The argument, if correct, implies a form of policy transfer, that is, “the process by which actors borrow policies developed in one setting to develop programmes within another” (Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996, p. 357). Policy transfer or policy diffusion1 occurs through different mechanisms, such as learning, competition, socialization, imitation and normative pressure and coercion (e.g., Berry & Berry, 2018; Marsh & Sharman, 2009; Shipan & Volden, 2008). In the particular case of British merit reforms, in which policy learning arguably took place within the same political system (Benson & Jordan, 2011) and in which the imperial core was (supposedly) influenced by the administration of its most prized colony, some of the mechanisms are evidently less relevant. It is, for instance, not likely that the Home Civil Service was coerced by British India to implement open competition, and it is, moreover, not reasonable to assume that it was competing with the ICS—beyond having to recruit from the same pool of potential candidates. We are then left with three mechanisms, viz. learning, socialization and imitation.
Learning denotes “a change of beliefs […] in the light of the experience of others” (Meseguer, 2005, p. 72). Berry and Berry (2018, p. 256) stress that the policy in the other jurisdiction should be perceived as effective: “a policy diffuses as a result of learning when the probability that one government—say, A—will adopt a policy is influenced by the perceptions of policymakers in A about the effectiveness of the policy in jurisdictions that have previously adopted”. Learning is not, however, necessarily based on all available information; policy makers and implementers take shortcuts and are, therefore, likely to be inspired by proximate experiences (Weyland, 2006). Socialization entails the internalization of preferences (Graham et al., 2013), while imitation equals “copying the actions of another in order to look like that other” (Shipan & Volden, 2008, p. 842).
The importance of shortcuts in learning speaks for diffusion from the Indian experience. Especially since there is a parallel possibility that there were important policy entrepreneurs with experience of the ICS that spread ideas pertaining to merit reforms to and within the Home Civil Service (Mintrom, 1997). At the same time, British-ruled India was clearly a very different context than that in which the Home Civil Service operated, which may have made both learning and imitation highly challenging. There is also the possibility of internal determinants impacting on the reforms in both the ICS and the Home Civil Service. To gain a deeper understanding of whether this is an example of policy transfer, we trace relevant diffusion mechanisms in the processes of reform and in the implementation of meritocratic recruitment in the case of the Home Civil Service.
While there are intuitive reasons to expect that a policy transfer from the ICS to the Home Civil Service did occur, the prevalent imagery that British merit reforms had colonial origins has not been scrutinized beyond anecdotal evidence and conjecture. It is, in addition, not clear whether this assumption refers to the political decision to reform or applies to its practical implementation. The present study, hence, combines qualitative and quantitative analysis to answer the following question: were the changes to ICS recruitment procedures a key source of merit reforms in the Civil Service as a whole? By answering this question, the article examines whether the argument concerning the inward diffusion of merit reforms is correct, and it contributes insights regarding the principal factors behind merit reforms historically and the extent to which a crucial element of British state making during the nineteenth century had colonial origins.
We enquire into ICS influence on the reform decisions through a wide-ranging and extensive analysis of archival material relating, on the one hand, to the Civil Service Commission (CSC)—which was established in 1855 as a direct consequence of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report—and, on the other hand, to the kept records and correspondence of the most important reformers, that is, Charles Trevelyan, Stafford Henry Northcote and William Ewart Gladstone. All of these were either bureaucrats or incumbent politicians who, through their involvement in deciding on the substance of merit reforms, potentially had a considerable impact on policy transfer.
ICS influence on the practical implementation is probed, first, by establishing—using a novel data set on examinations to the agencies covering the period 1855–1879—whether the observed patterns confirm that the ICS was the entity in which open competition was originally introduced. If the sequence turns out to be accurate this can be considered a first validation of inward diffusion.2 Second, we statistically explore whether agency heads' earlier experiences of being involved in the colonial administration of India mattered for the implementation of open competition. In other words, were policy entrepreneurs with Indian experience instrumental in the implementation of open competition in the Home Civil Service?
These enquiries allow us to affirm or reject the belief that norms, ideas and practices pertaining to British merit reforms were diffused from the ICS through learning, socialization or imitation. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses largely reject the idea of a strong diffusion from the ICS to the Home Civil Service. While our quantitative analyses show some, albeit mixed results when examining the relationship between having agency heads with Indian experience and the introduction of open and competitive examinations, no substantive evidence of policy transfer was found in the qualitative analysis.
2 REFORMING THE RECRUITMENT OF CIVIL SERVANTS TO INDIA
The recruitment of civil servants to the EIC underwent a comprehensive change in the first half of the 1850s. Open competition, available to “[a]ny natural-born subject of Her Majesty” being more than 18 years and less than 23 years old, was introduced in 1855 in the ICS as a direct result of the Charter Act of 1853 and Lord Macaulay's 1854 Report on the Indian Civil Service (henceforth “the Macaulay Report”). Work on the latter was initiated in April 1854 and finalized in late November the same year. The earlier practice of, through patronage and nomination, educating young men at the East India College at Haileybury before posting them to India was abandoned and replaced by a system based entirely on open examination and competition monitored by the CSC. The change meant that the College was closed and that the age of recruits was raised, chiefly due to the new ambition to employ men who had already obtained a university degree. It also, in theory (yet not in practice), “gave Indians an equal chance of admission” (Compton, 1967, p. 99).
Candidates were selected on the basis of how well they performed in a standardized exam, after which the most successful entered into a period of probation during which subjects deemed to be of particular relevance for the administration of British India was taught. The period of probation ended with a second exam, subsequent to which positions in the “covenanted service” of the EIC were assigned. Further exams awaited the successful candidates once they arrived in India.
“A committee was then appointed by the President of the Board of Control (for India) to advise on the best method for examining candidates. Macaulay was the chairman […]. The report was brief, but to the point; […] it was signed in November [1854]. The report recommended that Haileybury should cease to be maintained as a higher education college for the ICS; that there should be a broad general education […] rather than a specialist training for ICS recruits […]; that recruitment should be by open competition in order to select the best available candidates […]; and that appointment in the first instance was to be subject to a period of probation.” (ibid.)
Additional detail is needed, however. While the report advised that the initial selection of candidates was to be done on the basis of “an excellent general education”, including knowledge of Latin, Greek, the French, the Italian and the German as well as mathematics, “some natural sciences which do not fall under the head of mixed mathematics”, and the moral sciences, it recommended that the period of probation should be devoted to specialized subjects only (for the report, see CSC 2/17, 1853–1894). It is noteworthy that the significance ascribed to merit was affirmed at the time of the second examination, as the “seniority” of the successful candidates was to “be determined according to the order in which they stand on the list resulting from such examination” (Regulations framed by the Commissioners for the Affairs of India, January 1855, in CSC 2/17, 1853–1894).
The endeavor to overhaul ICS recruitment procedures was, as elucidated below, conceived of as distinct from coincident efforts to reform the Home Civil Service. The separation is foremost manifest in the kind of authority that officers of the ICS and the Home Civil Service were, respectively, seen to represent. The lack of perceived congruence was, however, also due to a widespread propensity to regard “imperial” (including “colonial”) and “domestic” matters as unconnected, a growing tendency among ICS officers to relate to Indian subjects in a patronizing and detached manner (Hoover Wilson, 2018) and the absence, in the case of the ICS, of channels or fora through which opposition to the reforms—if voiced by colonial subjects—could be registered and have an impact.
As alluded to above, the backdrop to the abandoning of patronage was not solely contemporaneous with the reform. Prior to the promulgation of the Charter Act of 1853, a scheme of restricted competition to the ICS already existed; the Charter Act of 1833 had prescribed that “the directors [of the EIC] should nominate annually four times as many candidates as there were vacancies, from whom one should be selected by competitive examination” (Chapman, 2004, p. 13). Yet these dictates were neither “effectively operated” (ibid.) nor did they equal open competition, as the nomination of prospective recruits remained the prerogative of the Court of Directors (Bowen, 1955, p. 118).
The amended recruitment practices were, moreover, closely connected to debates about how India specifically was to be administered. The main contentions in these debates revolved around whether to uphold the patronage system, replace it with open examination in Britain or to make the administration accessible to everyone irrespective of age, including those already based in India. Of related concern was the question of the desirability of further colonizing India in the sense of increasing the presence of British settlers and the—in that case—concomitant need to expand the ICS. Or as Major-General George Borlese Tremenheere summarized it in his testimony to the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India) on April 20, 1858: “The strength of the regular civil service is too small for a country of such a vast extent. They work hard, and are a most exemplary body of men; but there is a limit to individual exertion, and they look to England as their ultimate home” (1858a, p. 27).
These debates intensified as a consequence of “the Mutiny” against British rule in 1857, an event that generated a great deal of apprehension among the British relating to their physical security and the future of British presence in and possession of India. Although the status of the EIC as an imperial power came to an abrupt end with the passing of the Government of India Act, 1858 (“An Act for the Better Government of India”), which transferred imperial authority and paramountcy to the British Crown, these sentiments lingered.
The open examinations that were introduced in 1855 were, consequently, met with skepticism regarding the extent of their openness and inclusivity. Both British settlers in India and Indians were negatively affected by the fact that the exams were held in Britain and by the first test's emphasis on general knowledge, rather than on competence especially relevant for the ICS. As P. J. Marshall notes, the British community in India was “dominated by official employment, recruited in Britain and set on returning to Britain” (Marshall, 1990, p. 26). The sense among British settlers in India not affiliated with the ICS or the military was that, even as part of the new system, “gentlemen are appointed magistrates and judges without any regard whatever to their qualifications and aptitude in those respects, but merely as a matter of right, by virtue of them being members of a privileged service” (Joseph Gabriel Waller's testimony to the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India), 1858b, p. 169).
A parallel strand of critique concerned the foremost rationale for the merit reforms and whether patronage really was less advantageous for India than open competition. In 1858, John Abraham Francis Hawkins, employed in the Examiner's Office at the India House in London, for instance, maintained that “it appears to me that this system of competitive examination at home has been framed much more for the benefit of the Universities in England than for the benefit of the people of India” (ibid., 123; see also Vasunia, 2013, p. 203). Hawkins, hence, suggested that matters pertaining to conditions specific to Britain rather than India were behind the merit reforms. However, it seems more accurate to argue the exact opposite, that is, that the activities of the ICS, including those related to recruitment, were chiefly tied to imperial oversight and colonial rule (e.g., Dewey, 1973). C. J. Dewey has, for example, maintained that—despite that “the state of the home civil service” was considered “far worse”—the ICS stood out as “more important” to make “efficient” (ibid., 267). The dominant perception was that “the Indian civil servant exercised a power for good or evil which no English civil servant – perhaps no functionary in the world – possessed” (ibid., emphasis added; see also Cook, 1987).
In 1853, Macaulay correspondingly described the position of the British civil servant in India as one which had to “synthesize […] the prestige of an elite member of the governing race and that paternalistic absorption in the interests of native India upon which the I.C.S. prided itself” (see Compton, 1968, p. 267). Charles Wood, speaking as Secretary of State for India, told the House of Commons in June 1861 that “[a]ll experience teaches us that where a dominant race rules another, the mildest form of government is a despotism” (HC Deb 6 June 1861). These remarks clearly sets the ICS reforms apart from merit reforms “at home”, which makes it difficult to concur with the argument that the ICS provided the key underpinning of efforts “to establish a common culture of officialdom” in the form of “a homogeneous class of experts with a common ruling identity” in the Civil Service as a whole (cf. Osborne, 1994, p. 300). On the contrary, they confirm that, by the 1850s, the colonial administration in India—as part of its effort to project “an essentializing, objectifying differentiation of ruler and subject”—had come to rely on a pronounced “disengagement from Indian society” (Hoover Wilson, 2018, p. 24, 34).
Thus, we find no manifest and palpable substantiation of the claim that the ICS functioned as an explicit and direct testing ground—that is, that it represented a site of trial and error as suggested by, among others, Subramaniam (1957)—for the subsequent introduction of open competition in the Home Civil Service. What we, conversely, find is that considerations applicable to and strictly germane for the exercise of British colonial rule in India were enunciated and prioritized. While not disproving any of the aforementioned mechanisms of policy transfer, it does indicate that those who were involved in the ICS reforms saw these as an undertaking that was distinct and separated from more general civil service reforms.
3 MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY MERIT REFORMS IN THE BRITISH CIVIL SERVICE
The Northcote-Trevelyan Report (1854), first publicly referred to in the Queen's speech to Parliament in January 1854 and thus significantly predating the Macaulay Report, proposed the introduction of open and competitive examinations to positions in the public administration and that these should be centrally administered. However, the report was not met with unanimous support and the immediate result of the report was only a partial achievement of its proposals (Chapman & Greenaway, 1980; Gladden, 1967; MacDonagh, 1977, p. 207). On 8 March 1854, The Morning Herald even went as far as describing the report as seemingly compiled “by some crochetty pettifogger or tyrannical usher” (CET 48, 1854).
The Whigs came to power in 1855 and they were against its implementation. Prominent Whigs feared that open examinations implied that the lower classes, deemed to lack the right social class and qualifications, would be let into the Civil Service (MacDonagh, 1977, p. 207). In the words of Martin Shefter, the report “failed to win the support of the entrepreneurial classes and the aristocracy” (Shefter, 1977, p. 436). Its mixed reception and initially limited impact make Thomas Osborne's view that the report provided the main impetus for “administration as an autonomous ethos or art, separated both from the pull of political patronage and from narrow, specialized expertise” ring hollow (Osborne, 1994, p. 294; cf. Greenaway, 2004). A crucial impediment to reform was, thus, the lack of political support for reform, in particular, among Whig politicians. It is also noteworthy that the Administrative Reform Association, formed in 1854, supported administrative reform more generally, but not necessarily the introduction of the type of examinations that were advocated in the Northcote-Trevelyan Report (Searle, 1993, pp. 114–120).
“first, that the candidate is ‘within the limits of age prescribed in the department to which he desires to be admitted;’ secondly, that he is ‘free from any physical defect or disease which would be likely to interfere with the proper discharge of his duties;’ and thirdly, that ‘the character of the candidate is such as to qualify him for public employment’.” (CSC 2/66)
Its exact mandate, however, was vague. The minutes from a board meeting at the Treasury in December 1855 contain the following depiction: “no fixed rules have been prescribed as to the nature of the evidence by which the qualification of the candidates is to be tested, and […] the Commissioners will exercise a just discretion in adapting their proceedings to the varied circumstances of the different cases brought before them” (ibid.). The CSC did not, in other words, operate in a uniform manner during its first years of existence. Here again the ICS, through its clear regulations regarding recruitment and examination, stands out as an outlier rather than as a model that was learnt from or imitated.
In 1860, the Select Committee on Civil Service Appointments proposed that “a system of limited competition” should be adopted by every department; at least five candidates per vacancy should be nominated, according to its recommendation (Chester, 1981, p. 160; The Select Committee on Civil Service Appointments, 1860, p. xv). While the Committee addressed the issue of open competition, it did not recommend it as a policy to be implemented across the entire Civil Service. It did, however, advocate “that the experiment first tried at the India House [i.e. the India Office] in 1859, be repeated from time to time in other departments” (The Select Committee on Civil Service Appointments, 1860, p. xv). Some departments began to introduce open examinations in the period after (Gladden, 1967, p. 21), thus contributing to the incremental rather than abrupt undermining of “the old system of familial government” (Matthew, 1982, p. xxx). It was not until 1870 that another Order in Council was issued that made open and competitive examinations mandatory more generally in the Civil Service (albeit with exceptions) (e.g., Fry, 1969, pp. 34–69; MacDonagh, 1977, pp. 197–213; Richards, 1963, p. 53; Silberman, 1993, pp. 350–397). It is noteworthy that the Order in Council from 1870 states that “whereas the former Order [from 1855] applied exclusively to ‘junior situations,’ a term to which it was found in practice difficult to attach a sufficiently definite signification, the present Order applies to all situations not in terms excepted from its operation, whether the employment be permanent or temporary.” (CSC 8/4, 1875, emphasis added).
There are three important junctures (1854, 1855, and 1870) at which the ICS experience could have represented policy transfer in the form of learning, socialization or imitation. In the next sections we, accordingly, examine whether the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report, the 1855 Order in Council and the 1870 Order in Council were grounded in and mirrored ICS merit reforms.
4 QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS: DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE OF INWARD DIFFUSION?
In this section, we scrutinize the interdepartmental debates on ICS merit reforms that took place during the 1850s and 1860s in order to establish whether any signs of inward diffusion are discernible. We have searched for two elements specifically: (1) whether the ICS merit reforms were described as connected to a general reform of the public administration and (2) whether the ICS was referred to as a precedent and as an example that other offices should emulate.
It is, as elaborated upon in the preceding sections, not correct to maintain that the ICS reforms were equivalent to “the immediate prototype of an administrative system based on the principle of open, competitive examination” (cf. Osborne, 1994, p. 302). On the contrary, no significant mentioning of the ICS when the Home Civil Service is substantively discussed, and vice versa, is made in the CSC records or in the kept writings and correspondence of Charles Trevelyan, Stafford Northcote or William Ewart Gladstone. In relation to the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report it is noteworthy that this significantly preceded the Macaulay Report, which—as discussed above—was focused on the ICS, and that it did not contain any references to the EIC, India or its colonial administration. Also the preliminary deliberations on the report and its broader reception, including the 1855 Order in Council, seem to be almost entirely void of direct mentionings or even allusions to the ICS (for a few exceptions, see below).
The same observation applies to the 1860 report by the Select Committee on Civil Service Appointments (see the Select Committee on Civil Service Appointments, 1860). The report itself mentions “the Civil Service of India” in passing—as one example of “the gradual extension of” open competition “at the expense of private patronage”—and the appended minutes of evidence contain a number of reflections on the ICS reforms, with a clear emphasis on practical aspects of administering the exams (e.g., ibid., xiv, 52, 207, 321, 331). Yet nowhere is a direct or significant connection established between these and the Home Civil Service. It is telling that J. G. Maitland, Secretary to the CSC, when first being asked by the committee to comment on whether he has “any objection to apply the same principle [i.e. open competition] to the Civil Service of this country”—to which he responds “I think the argument [to apply it] a very strong one”—is not thereafter asked to elaborate further on this issue (ibid., 53). In response to an earlier question about his general views on open competition, Maitland himself accentuates difference rather than similarity when comparing “examinations for” the ICS, the CSC and the India Office (ibid., 16).
In light of the above, it, contrariwise, appears more convincing—when we consider the impetus behind the Northcote-Trevelyan Report and the 1855 Order in Council—to stress how “the appointment of the Trevelyan commission to inquire into the civil service [has] a long history” (Hughes, 1942, p. 60). As Edward Hughes observes, “[b]y 1854 reports on no fewer than eleven departments had been made” (ibid., 61; for details on these previous reports, see Civil Service Commission, 1860), and Jenifer Hart similarly notes that Trevelyan's kept “letter books confirm the view that it [the Northcote-Trevelyan Report] was the culmination of many years of thought and work […] and not just a flash in the pan” (Hart, 1960, p. 106; see also Mueller, 1984, p. 173; Greenaway, 2004, p. 2, 1985, p. 162). The view of a long history is also better at accommodating the existence of corresponding steps taken in other parts of the British Empire. Chapman has, for instance, drawn attention to how “[i]n South Africa […] a Commission was established in 1847 to improve the organisation of and regulate admission to the civil service”, and he mentions similar efforts to introduce “open competitive examinations” in the case of Malta (Chapman, 2004, p. 14; see also Jeffries, 1938, p. 8). What this speaks against is an immediate policy transfer, in the sense of a borrowing of policies, from the ICS to the Home Civil Service.
“The relations which should exist between the disposal of the appointments for the Home and Indian Service should be determined at an early stage of these proceedings. The same College of Examiners, perhaps the same system of examination, will suffice for both. The object in both cases is to obtain the best possible raw material for the public service, by examining the candidates in the branches of study in which they happen to be proficient.” (Add MS 44580, 1984)
The potential interrelation is, however, never identified as more than a mere concurrence.
“[The permanent Civil Officers of the Crown] cannot be compared with the officers of the Indian Service, who are trained for the administration of subjected Provinces, and rise to the dignity of Legislators […]. […]. The officers of our Civil Service cannot in ordinary cases aspire to become statesmen, and to carry out systems of policy.” (Add MS 44581, 1854, emphasis added)
Thomas Francis Fremantle, Chairman of the Board of Customs, concurred in his commentary on the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. Fremantle asserted that “the case of those officers [i.e. ICS officers] is essentially different from that of the ordinary civil servants of the Crown in this country” (Add MS 44585, 1854, emphasis added). These points do not cohere with or confirm propositions of a policy transfer shaped by learning, socialization or imitation.
The emerging pattern across the three junctures is, conversely, identical to the one that Alex Middleton detected while studying the debates that preceded the Second Reform Act, 1867. According to Middleton, “contemporaries made very few explicit links between the act and the empire, and […] those they did articulate were, for the most part, rote and insignificant”, and he specifically asserts that “Indian policy […] was not seen [during the 1860s] to have any relevance to domestic reform” (Middleton, 2017, p. 82, 90; see also Matthew, 1982, p. xlviii; Kaminsky, 1986, p. 37). The qualitative analysis, thereby, fails to verify the imagery of inward diffusion.
5 THE PATTERN OF IMPLEMENTATION OF OPEN COMPETITION
In this section, we examine the implementation of open competition in the Civil Service, including the ICS, and we, in particular, assess whether the data preclude or allow for the possibility that other agencies were influenced by the implementation of open competition in the ICS. For this purpose, we have coded data on recruitment from CSC's yearly reports. Our dataset, The Public Office Data Set (v.1), includes data from 1855 up to 1879. The CSC took over the responsibility for the examinations to the ICS in 1858, but the CSC reports contain data on examinations to the ICS also prior to that date (Civil Service Commission, 1859).
The data allow us to trace the implementation of examinations, whether these were only open to persons that had been nominated, whether there was some competition (i.e., more candidates for the position than situations finally offered), and whether there was open competition (i.e., examinations open for all with no prior nominations). Here, we focus on the introduction of open competition, which represents the true watershed, and we establish—by specifying the timing of implementation in the different offices—whether the ICS was indeed the first agency with open competition. That is, is the basic criterion for the argument about the “external” origins of merit reforms met?
Figure 1 shows the number of offices that had any examination for a position with open competition in a given year according to the data from the CSC. The data are presented in two ways, the total number of offices with open competition in any given year and the offices with open competition as percentage of all examining offices in any given year. The second number is, hence, adjusted to the number of offices.3 In 1855, it was only the ICS that had open competition. Thus, the data show that the essential condition for inward diffusion seems to hold. In the first year of the period, no other office than the ICS had introduced open competition. As Figure 1 demonstrates, it is not until 1859 that we have another office with open competition.4
We can also conclude that the Order in Council that was decreed in June 1870, which made open competition mandatory, was important as a catalyst for its implementation. The data show, as expected, that open competition increased substantially after 1870. The Order in Council of 1870 includes a list that details the agencies that were stipulated to implement open competition (de jure) (Civil Service Commission, 1870). It should be noted that The Public Office Data Set indicates when agencies actually had examinations with open competition (de facto). It is, nonetheless, interesting to note that many existing agencies were not listed and that, according to our data, several of the listed agencies had not held any examination with open competition by the end of the period covered by it; in other words, nine whole years after the Order in Council stipulated open competition. In total 54 agencies (out of 311) introduced open competition during the period. The second office to introduce open competition to any position was the India Office—set up as a government department in 1858 as a consequence of the dismantling of the EIC's administration of India (Kaminsky, 1986; Williams, 1966)—which might be indicative of similarities between offices being of importance.5
In sum, the ICS equals the first agency to implement open competition and it was not until several years later that other offices began to do the same. The fact that the ICS was first suggests that it was potentially—despite the findings of our qualitative analysis—also a source of inspiration for other agencies. However, it is also evident that the Order in Council of 1870 was an important stimulus for the implementation of open competition.
6 AGENCY HEADS' PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Even though the analysis, so far, does not substantiate the claim that the ICS functioned as a direct precursor to and model for merit reforms in other parts of the Civil Service, it is, nonetheless, possible that the (by others) posited diffusion was channeled through individuals that staffed various agencies. The personal experience of having been involved in the colonial administration of India may have been an important factor in the transference of ideas and practices associated with merit reforms from the ICS to the Home Civil Service. To examine how personal trajectories might have impacted on the irregular, yet incremental, implementation of open competition, we have collected data on agency heads from 47 agencies (see Appendix, Table A1) for which we have enough information and that did not deal directly with matters relating to India. We have excluded the ICS, Royal Indian Engineering College, India Board/Office, and India Forest Department since these agencies were directly connected to India.
We distinguish between Heads of Department (HOD) and Ministerial Office Holders (MOH). Some agencies are managed by both types, while other agencies are managed only by one of them. The HODs have the executive power of the agency and are closest to the actual operations, while the MOHs have the highest position and are politically appointed (but not always members of the Cabinet). Both types are, thus, important for decisions relating to the introduction of merit reforms.
We had to identify positions that could be seen as equivalent to the designations HOD or MOH since these vary between agencies depending on their character. We used Chris Cook and Brendan Keith (Cook & Keith, 1975) as the primary source for deciding which positions to code and for the names of agency heads. To determine whether a person had Indian experience, we primarily used the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which provides entries with biographical facts for many of the agency heads. Additional information was collected from other sources, such as the National Archives' website, the agencies' own websites, and Wikipedia. The documentation of all sources is available upon request.
Connections to India can be of different sorts. We have opted for a broad definition that encompasses any prior experience of having been to India or of being involved in the colonial administration of India. There are, for instance, agency heads that have served the EIC in a civil or military capacity, while others have past experience of being members of the Board of Control (also known as the India Board) or of being assigned the role as Secretary of State for India. We have coded whether a person had a connection to India prior to taking up the position and documented what sort of connection it was. We also code whether heads had experience of British India before or after the reforms of the ICS.
We then used the data on open competition presented above to examine whether there is any relationship between having an agency head with an earlier connection to India and the introduction of open competition. We also examine whether the results are different prior and subsequent to the 1870 Order in Council.
We first make a simple cross table, in which we include all 1017 observations (agency year), that is, 25 years (fewer years for those agencies that did not exist during the entire period 1855–1879) at the 47 agencies. The results (see Table 1) indicate that there was a higher probability for those agencies that were led by heads with India connections to employ examinations with open competition—18.52% compared to 8.99% in cases without a head with India connections—and the difference between the groups is significant.6 The results are similar for cross tables with only early or only late experience of India and for the period after 1870, but the difference between the groups is not significant for the pre-1870 period cross table, in which there are only eight instances of open competition.7
| India experience | Open competition | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| No | Yes | Total | |
| No | 729 | 72 | 801 |
| (%) | 91.01 | 8.99 | 100.00 |
| Yes | 176 | 40 | 216 |
| (%) | 81.48 | 18.52 | 100.00 |
| Total | 905 | 112 | 1017 |
| (%) | 88.99 | 11.01 | 100.00 |
- Note: Pearson's chi-square = 15.77; p < .001.
However, if we only take into account the HODs, the significance level is only p < 0.1 for the difference between the groups, and if only taking into account the MOHs there is no significant difference between the groups.8
While the previous analysis examined whether there was a difference between those agency years that had a head with India experience versus those without such a head in any year regardless of whether there had been open competition before, the next set of analyses examine whether India experience makes a difference for the first introduction of open competition. We employ Cox-survival analysis for this purpose. Figure 2 shows the results from the analysis with any India experience from any agency for the whole period (full output in Table A2). The survival rate is lower for those agencies that had a head with India experience (at t − 1). Only 20% of the cases, with a head with India experience, are estimated to survive, that is, not having introduced open competition for the entire period. 50% of the cases, without India experience, are estimated to survive, that is, not having introduced open competition. This suggests that having a head with India experience may have increased the likelihood of introducing open competition.
However, if we separate heads' early and late experiences of India (pre- and post-reform of the ICS) the results show that it was only early experiences that increased the chance of introducing open competition (Table A2, models 3–4). Moreover, when we divide the sample in a post-1870 and pre-1870 sample, the results are not significant for the post-1870 sample (Table A2, models 5–6). This implies that Indian experience only had an impact on the first introduction of open competition in the period before the 1870 Order in Council; however only five agencies in this model's sample introduced open competition in this period. This result is, thus, different from the result of the cross tables, in which we include all instances of open competition. Moreover, the analyses with only HODs or only MOHs do not show significant results.9
In sum, the bivariate analyses show some support, albeit not very strong, for a relationship between India experience and open competition. The results indicate that these effects are mainly driven by early India experience, that is, experience of India prior to the ICS reforms. This implies that, if anything, these results are not due to socialization of norms from the Indian experience of open competition. However, those heads with an early experience of India may still be more open to influences from British India due to their India experience. In addition, the analysis demonstrates that the potential importance of India experience is related to those very few instances of implementation that were made on a more voluntarily basis, that is before the Order in Council 1870. The analyses are, furthermore, sensitive to whether all heads are included or only one type of heads. Moreover, these analyses have not accounted for potential alternative explanations.
7 CONCLUSION
The article has examined if it is valid to conceive of the merit reforms of the ICS as the source of ensuing changes in the Home Civil Service. The conclusion is that there is not much support for the view that merit reforms in the ICS significantly influenced reforms in the Home Civil Service, and that it is consequently erroneous to conceive of the latter as an effect of policy transfer from the colonial administration of India to the public administration “at home”.
Even though the data on the introduction of open competition evince that it was implemented earlier in the ICS than in the public offices of the Home Civil Service, the qualitative analysis does not provide evidence for a decisive impact of the ICS. While we have included a vast archival material in our scrutiny, there is evidently additional material—such as internal debates within political parties—that could have been considered. Our material, however, undoubtedly comprises the most important agents of merit reforms in mid-nineteenth century Britain, and there is nothing that hitherto indicates that others played a more prominent or influential role in the reform process. Our related attempt to quantitatively assess the relationship between experience of India among agency heads and open competition shows some, albeit not very strong support for such a relationship. Thus, overall we do not find convincing evidence for inward diffusion and for the claim that British merit reforms had colonial origins. Rather, it seems as if the two processes—while partly running parallel to each other—were both informed by separate sets of demands and objectives and gave those primarily affected by the reforms markedly different possibilities to raise effective objections.
In the end, this might not be as surprising at it seems, especially if we return to learning, socialization and imitation as key diffusion mechanisms. The ICS as an institution was chiefly devoted to a despotic exercise of colonial rule, which neither sought to facilitate the emergence of “a unitary, centralized state” nor to respond to the wants and wishes of colonial subjects (cf. Man-Cheong, 2004, p. 1f). For the CSC, and other influential actors, to recognize the ICS as a precursor would have entailed the dual risk of having to admit to its less than noble role in India and to the ways in which the Home Civil Service similarly was detached from the concerns of the general public. The implementation of open competition in the Civil Service as a whole is, we conclude, foremost attributable to other factors.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Pia Lonnakko for excellent research assistance. They are grateful for the valuable comments from the three anonymous reviewers, the editors of Governance, Simon Davidsson, Martin Hall, Johannes Lindvall, Jørgen Møller, Petrus Olander, Anna Persson, Katren Rogers, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jan Teorell, as well as participants in the workshops, seminars, and panels during which earlier versions of the article have been discussed.
Courtesy: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gove.12683
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