The local public service: A weak institution forty years later

Abstract

Institutions in a State of Law seek to achieve valuable social purposes for the political community. They thus become public goods, and to this end they condition the behavior of the agents that interact in a given environment. Among these institutions are the so-called merit systems, widespread in our country since the 1978 Constitution and specifically, for the Local Administration, in title vii of the Law of Bases of the Local Regime of 1985. From a perspective based on historical institutionalism, it is maintained that the local personnel system was formed for practical purposes in the period 1984-1987. The decisions adopted in this period would condition the entire subsequent trajectory, until the arrival of the economic crisis of 2008-2012, which revealed the weak seams of the institutional framework of the local public service. Forty years later, it can be concluded that the institutional performance criteria are inadequate: their characteristic politicization, a collective bargaining model alien to administrative tradition and, above all, high temporality indices allow us to conclude that the institutional framework is notoriously weak. The question, faced with an environment that in the coming years will recreate the institutional framework, is whether the local Administration will once again reproduce the predominant inefficient pattern in the management of its personnel that characterizes it. The work concludes with some recommendations, focused on selection and professional public management, to strengthen a key institution in good local government.