The civil service

Keith M. Dowding

Radical reform of the civil service during the 1980s and 1990s has broken up the unified hierarchical structures, leaving a central core concerned with making policies, and peripheral agencies for implementing them. The Civil Service provides an up-to-date critical introduction to the working of these bodies, combining descriptive history and theoretical explanation, with an emphasis on public-choice theory. The first part of the book concentrates on managerial issues. The second part focuses on policy-making and the role of the civil service in terms of theories about the modern state. Assessing the reforms in terms of the public-choice and managerial theories which underpin them, Keith Dowding uses budget-maximising and bureau-shaping models to predict the directions we can expect reforms to take in the future, and what their success might be. Central to the argument in The Civil...

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