Borshchevskiy Georgiy

The article is devoted to the provision of public services as one of the aspects of administrative reform. The author considers the specificity, development and legislative support of administrative reform and comes to the conclusion about the beginning of its new stage and gradual introduction of methods and tools of ‘new public administration'. It is noted that the final consumer, able to assess the effectiveness of public services, is a citizen. People's satisfaction with interaction with the state has become the main ‘driver' of improving the quality of public services. The introduction of the system of public services in Russia contributed to the development of a new culture of interaction between government and society. The time has come to extend this experience to the entire public service workforce, including those who are not directly involved in the provision of services to citizens. This refers to the orientation of performance towards concrete, measurable and socially significant results. Such an approach, in addition to increasing the satisfaction of citizens, can significantly increase the motivation of civil servants to interest them in the quality of the performance of their duties. The creation of multifunctional centers ‘My Documents' indicates a vector for reforming the civil service - it is overcoming the departmental disunity, closure of the civil service system, the inclusion of various social groups and professional communities in assessing the effectiveness of the state apparatus. In addition, the ‘digitalization' of public services significantly reduces their potential corruption, thus making the state more transparent.

The article examines the question of how integrated the Civil Service reform program is in political discourse, and how the content of these programs depends on political changes. The statements about the Civil Service reform by Russian leaders have been studied in a wide time range from 1916 to 2016. The author had formed large empirical data to have the opportunity to use statistical methods. It was found that most of the statements related to Civil Service reforms chronologically coincide with the periods of social and political instability. The leaders of polar political orientation have voiced textually and substantially similar theses on the bureaucracy reform. All of them can be reduced to a few key themes. The politicians of different generations and political views have statements similar in form and content to each of these themes. For instance, every leader, communist or democrat, voiced the idea about the need for a gradual displacement of bureaucracy structures by the civil society institutions. The most quoted issue was about the public authorities efficiency and about the personnel management. The statements about the Civil Service interaction with society, as well as about corruption and Civil Service relationship with politicians were rarely stated. More or less often were discussed the questions regarding payment system and number of civil servants. Our hypothesis was proved to be right that the general direction of the Civil Service reform is experiencing relatively weak influence from political situation because institutional characteristics of the Civil Service are relatively stable. The statements from politicians about bureaucracy are strongly connected with political cycles and their main purpose is to criticize the previous leader. The promises to reduce bureaucracy, make political system cheaper and closer to people are an important element in pre-election rhetoric of political leaders, which attracts the support of voters to them.

The article considers perspectives of the involvement of management systems and professional standards in the sphere of human resources management. Such problems are considered on the example of the leading foreign countries, namely Germany. Moreover, the author analyses problems and perspectives of realization of mentioned staff innovations in public management practice in the RF.

The article ponders over the key aspects of research methodology on history of reforming and development of public service in Russia. The main issue is identified as the ambiguous understanding of the essence and the public nature of state service and lack of universal methodology of its historical studying among various researches. The above material presents the author’s concept of historical models of reforming state service and substantiates the approach to a periodization of history of development of civil service through the process of consecutive change of historical models. The carried-out review of various groups of sources of historical information and literature on issues of transformation of the Soviet public service into its modern system allowed to describe tendencies of this development process and to present applied practices on increasing the efficiency of civil service.