ABSTRACT
As an offshore island state from China, with a complicated historical background, Taiwan's civil service is a mixture of traditional Chinese "Mandarin” system with a modern administrative apparatus which supported the island's economic development from 1960 to 1980 but faced, in Samuel Huntington's terminology (1993), the third wave of democratization in the late 1980s. However, without purging the civil service like the East Germany party-state cadre system after unification, Taiwan's civil service transformation is an incremental process with many institutional and legal reforms over the years under the core problem of reconciling democratic responsiveness with professional responsibility. In this chapter, authors first utilize the principle-agent theory to describe the change of relationship between the people, politicians, and bureaucrats before and after democratization. Then, five of the reform efforts are selected and reviewed to reveal the complicated nature of democratizing a traditional "Mandarin” system. At the end, from the pessimistic outlook, the democratization leads to a declining sense of commitment and political tolerance in the civil service. The effectiveness of governing and solving public problems might be compromised. Finally, from the optimistic viewpoint, the process of reform is an effort to "rebuilding a boat in an open sea” with a balancing act of innovation and conservation; a newly reconciled democratic governing apparatus will eventually take place in the future.
