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This chapter discusses three possible interpretations of the development of British Public Administration over the twentieth century as a way of assessing its contribution to political science. Those interpretations are respectively labelled ‘dodo’, ‘phoenix’, and ‘chameleon’. The ‘dodo’ interpretation is a pessimistic fin de siècle view of British Public Administration as in serious decline from early promise and former greatness. The ‘phoenix’ interpretation is a more optimistic perception of the subject as advancing in scientific rigour and conceptual sophistication over the century, leaving behind the outmoded styles of the past. A third view, the ‘chameleon’ interpretation, is a picture of lateral transformation, with the adoption of new intellectual colouring and markings to fit a new era.

Public administration research and theory has undergone a fundamental change, unlike any other area in political science. Six fundamental assumptions of public administration have been challenged during this transformation: the assumptions of bureaucratic self‐sufficiency, direct control, uniformity, accountability, standardization of procedure, and an apolitical service. These assumptions have been challenged as ‘new managerialism’, ‘new patrimonalism’, and ‘new fragmentation’ have superseded thinking about public administration.

The title of this chapter reflects an important question about the contemporary development of public administration and its role within the contemporary state. It is clear that the public sectors in most contemporary European countries have been through some process of administrative reform, and that the traditional public bureaucratic (Weberian) sector has been, to a great extent, dismantled. The character of the emergent system for governing is not always clear, but the question posed by the reforms that have taken place is whether that earlier version of government can, or should, in any way be recaptured. The implicit and explicit argument is that a good deal of value has been lost through these changes in the style of governing, but that it may well be impossible (and undesirable) to rebuild anything approximating the older version of the state and the public bureaucracy. The different sections of the chapter look at the Weberian state (and other forms of bureaucratic government), critiques of the Weberian model, the dismantling administrative reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, and the issue of putting back together the Weberian state.

Questions the omission of law and legal perspectives in political science and advocates its relevance and overlap in two country examples: the USA and the UK. Legal politics, the role of the judiciary, public law and administration, and the constitutional politics of America are provided as examples, intended to generate future relationships in the areas of law and political science.

The democratic‐instrumental vision prescribes that public administration shall be a tool for preparing and executing policies and the will of the people. However, little is said about how administrative performance depends on how it is organized and how democracies best balance majority and non‐majority institutions. Chapter 5 conceives bureaucracy as a composite organization founded on three coexisting normative and organizational principles: formal-hierarchical position, legal rules, and expert knowledge. External relations are channelled through three gatekeeping institutions: legislatures, courts, and universities. There has not been a monotonic development towards an inevitable victory for bureaucratic organization, as argued by Weber, or towards de-bureaucratization, as argued by his critics. Both predictions assume context‐free principles that are functionally and normatively superior, resulting in convergence on a dominant model. This view contrasts with the observations that administrative practice and ideas have been closely linked to the territory, institutions, history, politics, and culture of specific polities.

In France, the notion of a senior civil servant is a social rather than a legal one, and senior civil servants may be defined through their role as privileged partners of political power and participation in government decision‐making; they are a heterogeneous group of senior managers of the state public administration, whose members share neither the same careers nor prestige nor professional culture, and regard themselves generally as intellectuals rather than as managers. The relationship between senior civil servants and politicians is more ambiguous and closer in the 1990s than it was during the 1960s, and the politicization of the senior civil service has been considerably strengthened, but senior civil servants still consider themselves as representing the permanence of the state, and are still reluctant to talk freely about their political involvements. Whatever the social changes that have occurred during the last 15 years and whatever the political changes, the senior civil service remains strong. An overview of the higher French civil service has to take into account three variables that interact simultaneously: the fundamentally individualistic culture acquired during years of professional training; the decisive role of the grand corps in the career path and in the representation of what is ‘good administrative work’; and the privileged social rank of the higher civil service. This chapter presents the main characteristics of senior public managers in France by trying to highlight signs of an evolution since the 1960s; the different sections look at recruitment and promotion methods, the political activity and mobility of senior civil servants, the internal hierarchy of the civil service, the sociological characteristics of senior public managers, the professional relationships of senior civil servants, the absence of any higher civil service policy, and the debated question of the erosion of higher civil service social status.

The comparative study of European executives stands at the interface of two subdisciplines of political science – comparative government (which focuses on the primarily political and governmental aspects of the executive) and comparative public administration (which focuses on the bureaucratic parts of the executive that extend beneath its thin political veneer). The tension between politics and administration is central to understanding the institutionalization of executives: it is first about the tasks that executives are expected to perform and the most appropriate executive organization; and second about the relation between the formal office and the office holders. The first main section of the chapter analyses how these two constitutive tensions in the institutionalization of executives play out in different countries; the discussion is with reference to executive coordination and the organization of centres of government. Further sections discuss the evaluation of executives, and executive reform. Overall, the analysis of the state of, and trends in, executive development suggests that the institutional foundations and fortifications of the executive may be less solid than is generally assumed.

The Danish senior civil service has a mixture of older and newer traditions, in which history and tradition are very important. Accordingly, this chapter starts by summarizing the historical background to the Danish central public administration and the historical role of Danish civil servants. Further sections then introduce the common organizational principles governing the central public administration. The different sections discuss: ranks and numbers of senior civil servants at the top levels; methods of recruitment and promotion; inter‐ministerial mobility; pay; party membership and the senior civil service; the status in the civil service of high status ministries; the social and educational background of top officials; women at the top; interaction and formal contacts within and between ministries; and political party policies towards the senior civil service.

This chapter offers a more detailed theoretical explanation of the tools employed to assess the coordination capacities at network and actor level. The different sections link the two major theoretical concepts (networks and governance), provide different views on the management of networks, present a scale covering the different meanings of coordination, and describe how this will be used to assess coordination during the different phases of EU policy making.

The first part of this chapter discusses retrenchment, recent institutional changes, and senior civil servants in Sweden; it attributes the recent changes in the senior civil service to the budgetary crisis of the state and the emergence of a less interventionalist control regime, in which the heyday of state‐driven economic and social change has gone. The main source of uncertainty now concerns the final destination of the rapid changes in many core aspects of Swedish politics and public administration. The different sections of the chapter look at: the size and structure of the Swedish civil service; ranks of senior civil servants; systems of recruitment and promotion; party membership among senior civil servants; inter‐ministerial mobility of civil servants; status in the civil service; the social and educational backgrounds of top officials; informal contacts across ministries and between ministries and agencies; the relationship between national and sub‐national officials and those working in agencies; political party policies towards the civil service; and the social status of the senior civil service.

Chapter 4 explores the processes through which institutions struggle for a place in the democratic order and how they achieve and lose primacy and autonomy. It attends to why it is difficult to find a form of political organization that is perceived as normatively best and also sustainable, securing a stable equilibrium between central government and partly autonomous institutions. The analytical value of ‘autonomy’ as detachment from politics and the apolitical dynamics of change assumed by many New Public Management reforms are questioned, and the interplay between central authority and institutional autonomy is interpreted as an artefact of partly decoupled inter-institutional processes involving the struggle for power among interdependent and co-evolving institutions that are carriers of competing yet legitimate values, interests, behavioural logics, and resources. The issues are illustrated by the cases of public administration and the public university.

Since public administration scholarship has to rely on knowledge sources across the three branches of knowledge, it is not surprising that the study features a great variety of theories-in-use. These are discussed in terms of their nature (art, craft/profession, science). Some PA-scholars favor a positivist approach believing that to be more scientific. In this chapter the case is made that PA-theory has to work with multiple approaches and theories for only then can it capture government’s complexity.

This chapter focuses on the first New Deal and access to Federal Emergency Relief, as well as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Civil Works Administration. Despite the New Deal's nationalizing reforms, intended largely to standardize relief policies across the country, local political economies and racial regimes continued to influence the administration of relief. Like blacks, Mexicans gained significantly greater access to relief during the New Deal, although they continued to face racial discrimination at the local level. Citizenship barriers were also typically strongest for local public work programs out West, and Mexican Americans were sometimes wrongly denied work relief on the assumption that they were non-citizens. The largest relief program during the first New Deal was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which brought blacks and Mexicans unprecedented access to relief.

As political leaders decided to make radical changes in the conduct of public administration, the centralized and hierarchical form of bureaucracy improved into a more flexible, responsive, market-based, and client-oriented form of public management. In this event, political change is also evident since the state attempts to open up its functions to competition to better accommodate citizens or ‘clients’. This change represents a ‘paradigm shift’ from the Weberian model of public administration to the ‘new managerialism’ — the process where states undergo bureaucratic reform by internalizing core values and practices that can be attributed to the private sector. This chapter includes a discussion about the evolution and spread of various managerialist ideas, the role of management consultants and the state on the politics of managerialism, and introduces the plan of the book and how the study uses primary data and quantitative evidence.

This chapter examines the historical developments in public administration and public services in Ireland during the period from 1870 to 1921. It discusses the launch of an open competitive examination for entry into the civil service and the Irish Civil Service Committee's (ICSC) fight against the tripartite division of the civil service. The chapter also highlights the increased activities of the local government board and the department of agriculture during the war, the establishment of the ministry of food and ministry of national service in 1917, and the creation of the department of education in 1920.

Information is the raw material of public decision-making. Within the sphere of European Union law, administrative decision-making relies heavily for this raw material on information networks based upon systems of decentralized information gathering and subsequent information sharing. The generation and use of information within network administration is thus one of the most essential elements of EU administration, and thus an essential subject of EU administrative law. This chapter addresses the various rules and principles — written and unwritten — on the generation, use, and dissemination of information by European and national administrative bodies for implementing EU law, focusing especially on those of general applicability across all sectoral areas.

Vincent Wright, a towering figure in political science, was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1995. He had specialised in the history of French public administration and, on moving to Oxford to an Official Fellowship at Nuffield College, turned more to comparative politics. Wright was co-founder of the journal West European Politics. Obituary by Jack Hayward FBA and Sudhir Hazareesingh.

Although British policy makers accepted managerialist ideas more enthusiastically than the policy makers in Canada and in France, this does not explain how Britain has one of the most mature and well-developed management consulting industries and professions. In order to analyse the impact of managerialism on public administration, this chapter investigates the following policies of bureaucratic reform to verify whether these have affected the predisposition of policy actors towards reform strategies and the access of consultants to decision-making centres: the 1968 Fulton Committee Report on the Civil Service; the 1970 White Paper on the Reorganization of Central Government; the 1979 Rayner efficiency scrutinies; and the 1982 Financial Management Initiative.

This introductory chapter provides a background of public administration. In the United States, the field of public administration was launched almost a century ago by people with bold aspirations. They were not interested only in the efficiency of government offices; they wanted a thorough overhaul of the American state so that it could manage the pressures of modern-day life. Unfortunately, this expansive view of the field's purpose has been lost. Over the last four decades in particular, the focus within the field has been mainly on smaller problems of management within the public sector. This is sometimes called the “public management approach.” This narrowing of focus might have made sense in the United States and a few other advanced democracies in the waning decades of the twentieth century, but it does not make sense today. Many people have recently protested this shrinking of ambitions. Thus, there is a need for a change of direction and to recover an expansive view of the field. This book proposes a way to do so.