Suchergebnisse

Examines the role of political staff in executive government and the consequences for policymaking and governance. This work reveals that good governance is about governments getting the advice that they need to hear as well as the advice that they want to hear

AbstractOne of the strands in the growing scholarship on political advisers in parliamentary democracies proposes that advisers can reduce the risk of civil service politicization by furnishing partisan advice to ministers, freeing civil servants to focus on the provision of expert competence. This benign narrative generates a significant hypothesis, which is that the institutionalization of the partisan role diminishes the risk of civil service politicization. That hypothesis has yet to be fully tested. Several studies have assessed the impact of advisers' actions on civil service impartiality, but the consequences of bureaucrats' own agency for that dependent variable have received far less attention. Drawing on data from a survey of New Zealand public servants, this article challenges the assumption in the political advisers literature that civil service politicization is primarily driven by exogenous factors and calls for a more nuanced theoretical approach to endogenous aspects of politicization.

Recent research on political advisers is characterized by an expansion beyond Westminster and clearer connections with proximate literatures. This article speaks to the second of these features by applying the Public Service Bargain (PSB) lens to minister/political adviser relationships in new ways. Extant PSB analyses either position political advisers as an independent variable influencing the core bargain between ministers and senior officials, or face difficulties when viewing advisers through existing perspectives developed to explain deals between politicians and public servants. Consequently, the nature of 'the bargain applying to political advisers' (Hood and Lodge 2006, p. 128) remains unclear. This article addresses that lacuna by deploying the reward, competence and loyalty dimensions of PSBs to specify the broad terms of the political adviser bargain, and considers the theoretical and empirical implications of such compacts.

By 2015 concern had emerged about the trajectory of Canada's Westminster model and the state of democratic governance under successive Harper governments, particularly with respect to transparency and relationships with public servants, which among other things led to the election of the Trudeau government in October 2015. This article compares these developments with the wholesale reform experiences in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. We consider not only the evolving bargains between prime ministers and their ministers, political advisors, top officials, and legislatures, but also between party leaders and political parties, and between governments and civil society. Second, we characterize far‐reaching reforms as "dares," intended to change the trajectory of Westminster systems, which carry political risks. Third, we consider the resilience of Westminster systems in the face of significant change and inaction. The Harper reforms were not nearly as dramatic as those of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia during the late 1980s but did change the bargain with civil society, foundational to Westminster systems.
The essential principles of responsible government have stood up well to the test of experience, and will serve as well tomorrow as they have in the past. However, parliamentary government is an inherently evolutionary form of government. Task Force on Public Service Values and Ethics (, 17)