ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a case study of policy-making concerning the establishment of a system for civil service neutrality in Taiwan. In May 2009, the legislature in Taiwan passed a statute, the Law of Administrative Neutrality for the Civil Service (LANC), to regulate the neutrality of the civil service after a lengthy drafting process which began in 1993. The major actor in this policy is the Ministry of the Civil Service (MCS), which is not affiliated with the executive branch of the state. The bureaucracy of the MCS is a corps of relatively independent officials who take a firm grip on the policy agenda of the public personnel system. The Minister of the Civil Service is directly appointed by the president of Taiwan without any endorsement by the Examination Yuan or the Legislative Yuan, the national legislature. Democratization in the 1990s started to reverse the powerful image of the Taiwanese bureaucracy.