Introduction
III.1 – Civic activity
III.2 – Education about democracy
III.3 – Elections
III.4 – Full access of all citizens to all information about the activities of public service
III.5 – Public debate
III.6 – Civic control
III.7 – Summary
When the citizens depose a dictator, the responsibility for providing public administration immediately falls upon them. How can they take care of it?
Clearly, they ought to be prepared in advance, otherwise a new dictator will rise and deprive them of the chance to build a democracy. The citizens must be ready to assume this responsibility, and must be ready to take the steps which will lead to a democracy.
Even the new dictator would have to be prepared because public administration is too complicated for improvisation. But the task is much easier for the dictator – his instrument is power. For the citizens, power would be a trap, in the long term. As soon as they would start forming a model in which the instrument of public administration would be power, they would not be building a democracy, but again only a dictatorship, even if appearing as a democracy. This is what has, in essence, happened also with the creation of the present democracies, beginning with the American democracy from the end of the 18th century. In these models of democracy the elected representatives of the citizens obtained, and continue to obtain, power over the public administration of their countries for the duration of their mandates. They may use it for honorable and frugal service to their fellow citizens, and in the traditional Western democracies they often do so. However, they can also misuse it for their own benefit or the benefit of their special interest groups – and this, unfortunately, also often happens. Overall, the development of the democracies of our world moves more towards greater abuse of power than to straight public service.
It is this corrupt evolution that motivates us to rethink again the prerequisites of democracy. The consideration about what instruments the citizens have to implement democracy is an indivisible part of it. They are necessarily more complicated instruments than the traditional power, which simply orders how things will be done. They must also be instruments which can be used by all citizens. The democratic practice already indicates such civic instruments – we can see six main instruments which the citizens can establish and use for managing their public service:
All these instruments are known in today's democracies in some form, and all have a great anti-corruption potential. Various civic initiatives call for the implementation of some of them, and some elements of some of them have even already been implemented. Even so, we expect that their full implementation, in a form which would ensure straight democratic public service, will yet require many struggles.
Democracy begins and lasts with civic activity. As soon as the citizens slow down their activity, very soon people emerge in public administration who wish to push through their own agendas or serve backstage special interests.
Democracy can be formed after the citizens get rid of an unwanted ruler or dictatorship. If, however, it is indeed to be created, a critical mass of the citizens must be ready to establish it at the time of deposing the dictatorship. These citizens must possess a clear concept of what democracy entails, what is required for its establishment, and ready plan how to proceed to set it up. If, at the moment of the opening for such action, this group of democrats is not prepared to make the attempt at the transition to democracy, the individuals or groups seeking power will soon find a way how to grab it, and a dictatorship will prevail again, even if possibly not quite obviously. The goal will no longer be honorable public service but using administrative power for their own purposes. We have seen such developments repeatedly in the whole post-Communist world, and elsewhere, when the so called new democracies were formed.
The citizens will help the establishment of democracy only when they will have reasons to trust the leading persons who talk about establishing democracy. After November 1989 the Czech citizens joyfully welcomed the hope for a change and the transition to democracy, and the first about year and a half they also helped the transition with their own efforts. But then they realized that their hopes will not be fulfilled, some sooner, others later – and they withdrew into passivity, where they remain to this day. Yet, for the most part, the citizens do wish to be active, despite the prevalent prejudices to the contrary.
If, one day, the chance will again appear to make the attempt to form a proper democracy and the citizens will be active and ready, the first task will have to be to push through a decent democratic constitution securing the basic principles of democracy and setting up the civic instruments of democracy – which we consider in this section of our study. Such a constitution can be written well in advance. Immediately afterwards they will have to organize elections in accordance with the new constitution and form the new representative assemblies. In this way the citizens can take over the public administration into their own hands, and will be able to start implementing a democratic public administration, which means a democratic public service.
The above described creation of a democracy by the efforts of citizens establishes a true civic society, so often invoked, but never soundly defined. Civic society, in our understanding, is a society in which not just the personal and social life of the citizens is in their own hands, but also the responsibility for public administration.
In the optimal democratic situation the citizens behave as a large family – the access to information facilitates the participation of all in the administrative processes, everybody can see when someone cheats and can prevent it, most rejoice from good results and most regret bad ones. To some extent we can see such situations even today in some traditionally democratic countries, mostly at the local level, for example in Switzerland, in Scandinavia or in Northern America.
Democracy cannot arise when the citizens do not know what democracy is, or what it should be. This, however, is the state of affairs around the world today. People seem to believe that they naturally understand the concept of democracy – while in reality they have only partial impressions or completely erroneous fantasies. One of the most dangerous and most widely believed notions is that the essence of democracy is free competition of political parties. We even have it in the Czech Constitution, in Art. 5 – here we have written about it in Chapter II.8, Faults of the Czech Constitution.
Education about democracy, together with civic activity, are the basic prerequisites for the creation of democratic public administration. It is therefore indispensable to have a workable theory of democracy prepared and polished in debates independently of and before a democratic revolt. To embark on the process of building democracy without such a theory is dangerous, because such a process without clear goals can easily be led astray by non-democratic interests.
Forming a reasonable theory of democracy will require a thorough public debate with the participation of a sufficient number of people with sensible understanding of public administration, preferably also with different philosophical backgrounds. Embarking on an in-depth debate about democracy, its principles and prerequisites, and possibly also about its practical procedures, is thus an important task for all who would wish to implement democracy. This holds for all countries, including the countries of Western civilization whose citizens today mistakenly believe that they already know the answers to such questions.
It would be great if the results of such debates were eventually introduced into schools. This will not be easy though because today even the awareness that we need such a debate about democracy is mostly missing. We must also expect that many among the powerful of our world will try to prevent debates about democracy, not to speak about its principles and procedures.
The citizens cannot secure public services by themselves because it is beyond their capabilities. They cannot each have the needed qualification for all the various tasks, they have not time to think about them (they must take care of their livelihood), and many are not even interested to contribute to public service. For these reasons it is also impossible to form direct democracy, decision-making by referenda about problems of public administration. Since somebody has to provide the public services, when the citizens do not wish to have a dictator, who would rule and provide the services for them, they must employ some representatives to do this work for them.
To select such representatives the citizens have only one reasonable instrument, a tender, just like for the selection of any other suppliers. In this case the selective procedure is called elections. Indeed, in all present democratic systems elections are used to select people's representatives, as we have already written in Chapter I.3 about the principles generally accepted in democracies.
All organizations with regional or countrywide activity select their representatives for their regional or country councils by elections. In all these cases, the members of the organizations need to have full trust in their representatives, just as citizens need it with regard to public administration. So, they select them in the most natural way – in the local branches they choose their fellow members whom they consider the best for the task and whom they trust. The representatives for democratic public service ought to be selected in the same way – in local election districts where people know one another or can know one another.
It is decisive for successful elections, and the success of democratic public service in general, whether the citizens manage to form a legal election framework which will prevent corruption and will lead to selecting representatives who will not succumb to corruption. The citizens should therefore try to select as their representatives people who are trustworthy, honest, frugal and capable. These are obvious criteria for any profession – nobody wishes their employees, craftsmen invited for a job or some other suppliers, to steal or misuse their money. Equally, this holds also for the elections in which the citizens select representatives they authorize to run their public administration, and entrust them with the huge means for this job.
Unfortunately, the natural manner of elections in not used in democratic practice. Ever since the beginnings of modern democracy in the United States at the end of the 18th century the election candidates were proposed from the top, in those days by the prominent politicians, the Founding Fathers. The circumstances helped it – the personality of George Washington was so dominant that no doubts arose about his nomination and selection as the first American president. At the same time political parties began to be formed in the U.S., the Federalists mostly in the North, and the Republicans in the slave-holding South. Thus the tradition of election nominations by political parties developed. Later it was fully adopted by the European democracies, including our post-November one – and the selection of the candidates became the domain of party secretariats.
When the legal election arrangement prescribes the selection of election candidates from above, it is highly probable that the selection will become dominated by powers with big financial resources which can afford the hugely expensive election campaigns. Such powers do influence today's democracies, and they often do so as covertly as possible. A sad revelation about such attitudes was the uncovering of the power structures and manipulative practices of the American Democratic Party during the presidential election campaign of 2016. In this case the media and backstage manipulation failed, but it was an exception.
Elections are a critical point of democratic public administration. And they are amply used by the backstage powers. The tools used for wrongful influence are primarily
The political influence groups which seek to gain influence in public administration are mostly formed around large private companies or groups of entrepreneurs, or are created by foreign secret services. In some countries they can also be created by churches or religious movements, or by organized crime groups.
After the backstage influence groups seize control of public administration, the links between the citizens and the elected representatives are weak. As a result, deep systemic corruption can develop in public administration. The goal of the influence groups which acquire power is not honorable public service but pushing through their own interests, and particularly reinforcing their own power position. This way, however, democracy slowly passes over into a covert dictatorship. Thus the election arrangement with the selection of candidates from above can lead and often does lead to a cutting down on democracy for the benefit of the ruling influence groups, or, in the worst case it can lead to its elimination.
The above-mentioned revelations show that the dominant influence group in the United States is some association of the rich called the “establishment.” In our post-Communist world we must count on the Russian government to be such a powerful covert political influence, acting through their secret services with large networks of agents developed already over the long decades of Communist rule. The Czech counterintelligence service, BIS, has warned for years about this threat, but the institutions of Czech public administration, the Parliament and the government ignore these warnings, almost as if they were also under some such influence. Another such threat may lately be developing with Chinese influence.
For a correction of the election system it will be necessary to concentrate on the spots where public administration is penetrated by corruption. Such spots have already been indicated in the previous paragraph:
The possibility to insert individuals obliged to serve the corrupt influence groups must be taken from the political parties. The best and easiest way to do so appears to be to change from choosing election candidates from above, by the political parties, to the natural selection of candidates by the citizens themselves, from bottom up.
The election of representatives from bottom up by the citizens would also eliminate the possibility that the corrupt groups could use their financial advantage to influence elections. In elections organized in small local districts where people know one another the role of money would be negligible and the role of the media would also be much reduced. The citizens of the local district would themselves propose the candidates they would wish to represent them. A local election committee would print election lists with all the proposed candidates, with practically no expense. The citizens would vote by circling one, two or three names, according to the accepted local regulation. The candidates with with most votes would become the local representatives. They would then choose from among themselves a representative for the higher, probably regional assembly, as we have already described in Chapter II.6.
Elections from bottom up, together with effective implementing of the other civic instruments of democracy described in this section, and with recommended criteria of moral rectitude, frugality and ability to approach problems reasonably, would make corruption in public administration very difficult and would probably all but eliminate it. To manipulate tens of thousands of election districts appears to be beyond the power of the now already routinely used professional election agencies or foreign secret services. It would be a tremendous shift for the better compared to the present election systems, with which the citizens have almost no reliable information about the proposed candidates, cannot have trust in them, particularly after all the experiences of the last decades after the fall of Communism.
We can assume that the moral integrity of citizens in the local election districts will be sufficient to elect mostly honorable and trustworthy representatives. The local elections can then be followed by indirect elections from bottom up for the higher representative assemblies, as it is done by all other organizations or even political parties with internal democracy. The local councils would send their deputy to the higher-level assembly, and so on all the way to the country assembly, the parliament. Full transparency of the democratic public service would undoubtedly have further beneficial influence on the quality of the representative bodies, as much as the permanent well-informed public debate allowing the participation of all interested citizens, and effective impact of the civic media and elected control assemblies. For possible critical situations it would be possible to introduce further measures, like the possibility of withdrawing representatives by their local electorates or by the lower assemblies which elected them, for example in cases of attempted corruption.
In the Czechlands the correction of the election system and the whole political arrangement may be difficult because it is based on the “free competition of the political parties” by the Constitution, and thus puts the election system from above under constitutional protection. It can therefore only be corrected after new honorable political parties appear or at least some of the existing political parties improve. The citizens would certainly welcome such a change – their search for better political parties is evident in all elections, and can also be discerned in the gradual improvements of the quality of the representative assemblies at the lower administrative levels, particularly in smaller communities. Of course, in the smaller communities the candidate lists are often formed by groups of independent candidates and not the country-wide political parties.
There are many such advantages:
All representatives would in this system be also local representatives. With full access to the information about the work of public administration the citizens would have good knowledge about the performance of their representative not only in his work for their community, but also about his work in any higher assembly if he were elected there. There is no fear that the citizens would not watch his performance – they would analyze his work and attitudes permanently, in the local pub, in homes, or in various local meetings. We can also assume that the representative would frequently come home to debate with his fellow citizens, to inform them about the developments in public administration, to reassure them about his motivations, to draw inspiration from their opinions and to preserve their support for his work. As soon as he would become lax in doing so he would expose himself to possible dissatisfaction of his voters and, possibly, to being withdrawn from his position and replaced.
It can be assumed that it would be possible to design a sensible process of withdrawing representatives who would lose the trust of their voters, even during their election term. Such a representative could be recalled by special elections in his local election district, and if he served in a higher-level assembly also by a vote of confidence in the lower assembly which elected him. The citizens deserve to have their public service provided by the best and most trustworthy, and so they should have the possibility to withdraw them.
The worry that withdrawing representatives could spread and have negative impact on public service is unfounded. The stability of the system of public service proposed here is primarily given by the decision-making based on public debate, in which the representatives are chiefly organizers of good and constructive debates, intended to seek the best solutions of individual tasks. This makes the representatives replaceable; the possibility to withdraw them can be added to the set of anti-corruption instruments, as it is almost certain that some suspicion of corruption would be a reason to initiate the withdrawal process.
3) Preventing corruption
If the election criteria adopted by the society for the representatives would be moral rectitude and frugality, the chances of corruption would be substantially lowered. The possibility of withdrawing a representative during his term would also work to prevent corruption.
4) Elimination of election campaigns
The bottom-up elections would not need any expensive election campaigns because the citizens know each other in the local districts. The danger of media manipulation would also be far lesser than in the existing arrangement with political parties, in which the citizens lack trustworthy information about the candidates. The permanent manipulative campaigns designed to boost the image of otherwise untrustworthy politicians or to discredit others throughout the elections terms which we see today would also disappear. Private ownership of the media also could not have such important influence in the local districts.
5) Elimination of the influence of money
The possibility to influence elections in small local districts by money would also be limited. No expensive billboard or other campaign could skew the neighborly knowledge about the qualities of the election candidates. As a side benefit, the rich and often nontransparent influence groups would thus lose the motivation to create political parties with the goal of dominating representative assemblies.
6) Elimination of the competition of political parties
If the accepted criteria for the election into public service representative assemblies were moral rectitude and frugality, the citizens would choose among their neighbors according to how they know their behavior. Political party membership could be a part of their knowledge about a candidate, but it could not be a reason for election. The political parties would then most likely return to their often-mentioned role of promoting ideologically and sociologically motivated proposals for solutions of public service tasks. The citizens would be spared observing the embarrassing sport-like contests of feeble-minded slogans designed by PR experts of the parties, in which end justifies means and democratic public service is the last thing considered.
Without the political parties the citizens' representatives would not be distracted by their party obligations and policy lines, or even party instructions, as is customary now. They could unconditionally concentrate on providing services to the citizens and search solutions satisfactory, as much as possible, for all citizens.
7) Elimination of the influence of party secretariats
The elimination of the influence of party secretariats would by itself be a significant anti-corruption achievement. Big corruption requires influence at the upper levels of public administration, and the role of the present powerful party secretariats is central in such plots.
8) Elimination of playing with election laws
The election laws would become considerably simpler. In the local districts the elections would consist in drawing up the list of the proposed candidates, and on the election day the citizens would circle their favorites. The elections for higher-level assemblies would be the responsibility of the already elected lower assemblies and would proceed in a similar manner. No quorums would have to be considered nor any other complicated procedures. It would be impossible to limit the possibility of citizens to run in elections, or to try to prevent the creation of new parties.
9) Elimination of the influence of foreign secret services
Foreign secret services, as much as local corrupt influence groups, would lose the chance to gain influence because it is unthinkable that they could influence the selection of representatives in tens of thousands of local election districts. Even if they succeeded to push through their candidate in some districts, in the elections for the higher-level assembly such candidates would have to prevail by their own qualities.
10) Elimination of the discontinuity of public administration
Bottom-up election would also eliminate the discontinuity of democratic public administration, the gravest shortcoming of the present models of democracy, sharply contrasting with the stability of dictatorships, particularly those in Russia or China. The present system of democratic public administration practically excludes long-term planning. Today's democratic representative assemblies have about one year of their four-year term for the preparation of important laws if they are to succeed in getting them approved. In the process they usually first spend a lot of energy in trying to undo the results of the work of their predecessors. In the last year or even more of their term they must already prepare for new elections and avoid any controversial steps which could harm their election chances.
The bottom-up system would have none of these drawbacks. Newly elected representatives would smoothly continue the work of their predecessors in the search for best solutions, based on the work of experts and the examination of fully informed and transparent public debate. The whole process would be fairly independent on the changes in representative assemblies' memberships. Time-proven representatives would more often remain in their positions, all the time under the careful scrutiny of their neighbor voters.
Democratic public service is created by the citizens and they retain as much decision-making in their own hands as possible. It follows naturally and logically that in a proper democracy all information about the activities of public service must be accessible to all citizens. The representatives and all other workers of public service are employees of the citizens in a democracy. The citizens thus have an indisputable right to know what these people do, whether they fulfill their tasks properly, whether they act in the interest of the citizens, whether they act frugally.
The value of being informed about the work of public administration for the citizens cannot be overestimated. Only with full access to the information can the citizens adequately participate in their public service, but beside this such full access, as much as the other civic instruments of democracy, has great preventive anti-corruption power. Full access to information and public debate held obligatorily before adopting decisions in public administration, together with the duty to respect the results of the public debates, would already by themselves practically eliminate corruption.
Full access to information together with public debates would have a significant impact also in protecting the society against hostile subversive and dis-informative propaganda. Lately such propaganda is organized particularly by Russia, with growing intensity and with the obvious goal to weaken the targeted societies and to gain influence there. The experience with Soviet Communism, and also with the contemporary conduct of the Russian government with regard to Ukraine, shows clearly that sustained disinformation propaganda can affect the behavior of whole societies. The citizens must therefore devote concentrated attention to securing reliable information for all their fellow citizens.
The duty to submit all information about their activity would also have beneficial influence on the behavior of the representatives and the administration officials. With the awareness of such permanent access to information about what they do the workers of public service might not even start thinking about corrupt projects. On the contrary, they would have strong motivation to act in accordance with their assignment, and to act as well as possible.
By contrast, as soon as the access to information about the work of public administration is limited, in whatever way, the citizens lose the possibility of oversight of the administration, and the space opens for its worse performance, and eventually for corruption. Without access to information the citizens not only lose the possibility to participate in public administration and supervise its work, but soon they also lose interest to care about it.
The need of access to information in democracy is known to some extent, and even the Czech Republic has a law ordering the institutions of public administration to provide information about their work. But the timid provisions of this law are only the first shy little step on the way to real democratic access to information. The law does not require continuous publicization of information, only subsequent furnishing of information somebody formally submits a request for – and then it is usually too late to prevent corruption, not to speak of making civic participation in public service possible. Additionally, the law does not set any penalties for failing to provide the requested information. The only useful result of this law is the insight into how reluctantly our politicians and officials provide information about their work, and how they prefer to hide it. Yet, the only reason for hiding information can be corruption.
Even in proper democratic public service there will be certain exceptions from the duty to publicize information, namely in the areas of security and protection of personal information. For example, information about the investigation of crimes may have to be withheld during the period when it could influence the investigation. In international relations it may be necessary to withhold some information from enemies, or withhold information blocked by international treaties.
In all such cases, it is necessary to hold thorough public debates about the rules for withholding information before such rules are accepted. The citizens are entitled to know what information is temporarily inaccessible to them and why, and also to know when it should already be made accessible to them again.
Information is mediated by the media today. Democracy therefore needs media which can guarantee to provide full and straight information to the citizens. It cannot be private media, it must be media under the control of the citizens themselves. We shall call such media the civic media.
The citizens have only one instrument of creating institution, and this is elections. If they are to establish their civic media the best way for them is to elect separate media representative assemblies to form such media, as we wrote about it above, in the Chapter II.6 – Institutions of Democracy. After they secure their independent civic media the citizens can charge them with not only mediating information, but also sorting out the information and publishing an adequate selection, so that the citizens gain easier access to important information. The civic media can also be required to make sure that no valuable or insightful information is lost and, at the same time, the debate is not overburdened by useless information.
A certain seed of fully-fledged civic media is the present so called “public-law media.” As they are set now, however, their task is not to provide full information about the work of public administration to the citizens nor to moderate public debates, and the way they are organized does not guarantee to the citizens their reliability.
The arrangement of the work of the civic media will have to be done very carefully and responsibly to prevent their abuse for corruption. These media must fulfill their societal role and must also be sufficiently independent, so they cannot be misused by any corrupt interests. It will no doubt be possible to design such an arrangement. Beside external civic control, there can be parallel civic media assigned to do the same work, and other control measures can be adopted.
The introduction of the civic media is in no conflict with the existence of private media. The private media can, in fact, also play a valuable role with regard to public service. They can serve as an additional watchdog, can add further debate to what the civic media bring, and can contribute to public information in other ways. In any case, in a democracy the private media must have full access to information about the activities of public service – as, in fact, all citizens do.
Public debate is the instrument of decision-making in democracy.
In a dictatorship the instrument of decision-making is power, the ancient right of the stronger. The decision-making based on power has been taken over from the one-time tribal communities by the later larger and more complicated societies. They have always had some ruler who governed himself, or in an association with a few others. The decision-making through power slipped, however, somehow, also into the present models of democracy, in which the elected representatives of citizens are given power to decide by constitutions. The solutions of public administration tasks are reached without citizens' participation, with partial public announcements. They are often reached “behind closed doors,” and sometimes quite secretly. Such decisions behind closed doors are almost always corrupt, influenced by backstage interests, and often harmful to the interests of most citizens. Private special interests crown these undemocratic processes by buying up media and manipulating the information provided to the public. No free public debate can be maintained in such an environment.
In every reasonable community the basis for solving tasks and problems is a debate. Before a community – imagine a family or a meeting of some free-time interest organization – adopts a decision, it weighs carefully all possibilities, circumstances, drawbacks and costs.
The decision-making of democratic public service ought to proceed similarly. It should be based on as broad as possible public debate, organized by the representative assemblies, with the participation of relevant experts, and fully presented to the public by the civic media. Such debates should
Civic decision-making based on public debate in a democracy might, with the existence of civic media, proceed somewhat as follows:
The public debate continues even after the accepted solution is under implementation. It should remain under the supervision of the assembly and the media, and its quality and shortcomings ought to be evaluated. In case of need, the accepted solution can then be revised, after new rounds of consideration and public debate.
The decision-making procedure described above, with the use of all the civic instruments of democracy and going on under the eyes of the public with full transparency, practically excludes all chances for corruption. At the same time it is a procedure seeking solutions satisfactory for large majorities of citizens, not just solutions welcome for the voters of some ruling political party. The solutions taken in today's models of democracy suffer from instability because the first move of an opposition political party, when it wins some next elections, is to dismantle the solutions adopted by their rivals. In the bottom-up system the solutions of problems would be adjusted rather than dismantled.
The decision-making based on public debates would finally bring the possibility of long-term planning into democratic public administration. When new representatives would be elected they would take over from their predecessors the supervision over the work of the expert groups and the incorporation of new ideas. While in the existing models of democratic public administration long-term planning is impossible, in the bottom-up system it becomes a natural feature of the administrative work, of public service.
Democratic public service employs representatives, officials and other workers to provide public services for the citizens. As any other employer, the citizens must control whether these employees perform their tasks properly, in accordance with the civic assignment and respecting the rules accepted in the society. Clearly, in a democracy the citizens have no reason to hand over to their employees power, as has happened with the Czech Constitution. The elected representatives and the other workers of democratic public service are provided by the citizens with authority, means and work instructions in accordance with law, and must account to the citizens for their work.
Just as in the case of the basic administrative representative assemblies, the citizens cannot do the control work themselves and must establish control institutions for the purpose. They can only establish these institutions by elections because elections is their only tool for doing so (see Chapter II.6). It appears most appropriate to create an independent system of control representative assemblies parallel to the basic system of the administrative assemblies, so that a control assembly corresponds with every administrative assembly.
The authorities of the control assemblies will have to be set wisely. Their workers ought to have unquestioned access to all the information about the work of the administrative assemblies, equally, of course, as all citizens ought to have. Their task would be to control the work of the administrative assemblies and the institutions of public service in all aspects of their work, to publicize their findings in the media, work out proposals and inspiration for changes and improvements, and to contribute to the education about democracy.
The activities of civic control must be as transparent as the activities of all other institutions of public service, its results must be continuously publicized and its work subjected to media and control oversight. The immediate publicization of the findings of civic control will be another contribution to both direct and preventive protection against corruption. The exceptions from the duty to provide information would be the same for civic control as they are for the public service in general.
The offices of civic control must also be subjected to civic control because they, too, can be exposed to corrupt temptations. Such control could be organized as mutual controlling acts of the various workplaces of civic control, determined independently, by decisions of the administrative assemblies or by some other suitable selection.
The control assemblies could also serve as second chambers of the final decision-making of public service, and thus further strengthen the protection against rash or even corrupt decisions.
The absence of civic control is a fundamental flaw of today's models of democracy. The citizens elect parliaments, and this is, in most existing democracies, the end of their participation in their own public administration. The legislatures of today's democratic countries do not establish any independent mechanisms of control of their governments, and definitely no mechanisms under the control of the citizens.
The present Czech administrative system also has this shortcoming. It has institutions with control authorities, for example the police, the internal intelligence service BIS, the Supreme Control Office, the Office of the Ombudsman, or the Financially-Analytical Department of the Ministry of Finance, but all these institutions serve the governing power. They carry out internal control of their own offices or partial expert controls of subordinated institutions, or they control the citizens. But the decision-making work of the Parliament, the lower-level representative assemblies, the government and other central institutions proceeds basically without control.
Administrative models organized in this manner are as if created for corruption. The result, affecting even the better established Western democracies, is the influence of corrupt backstage networks of the rich and powerful, which have formed avenues of permanent influence through convenient election laws and conventions, expensive election campaigns and other manipulative procedures.
The Czech constitutional system contains even elements directly supportive of corruption. One such element are the provisions of Art. 2 inserted into the Constitution with the assertion that while under Communism the government power could do as it wished and the citizens were powerless, now the state will only be allowed to do what is stipulated by law, and the citizens will be allowed to do everything not forbidden by law. It is, however, impossible for the legislation to contain permits for the whole width of public service, nor prohibitions for all aspects of mutual disrespect people are capable of. The provision allowing the citizens to do everything not prohibited by law almost incites to seek loopholes for corruption or other crime. Moreover, according to Art. 26 of the Constitution the elected Parliamentary representatives are “bound by no orders,” which relieves them of any control beyond their initial oath of service. And many of them do not bother very much even about the obligations following from this oath.
The outline of the civic instruments of democracy and their anti-corruption potential, which we are presenting here, indicates how the further progress of the democratic public service could develop. Even within the frameworks of today's legislatures substantial steps could immediately be taken to improve the work of public administration, particularly in the areas of education about democracy, access to information about the activities of public administration and public debates. Today's democratic public administrations even now have enough latitude to start with such efforts, and schools could also already now look for ways to improve education about democracy and to introduce student debates on any issues they choose.
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