The civil service

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 Service is an examination of the term 'efficiency' in the context of the reforms. Comparing public choice 'rent-seeking' arguments with more traditional 'pluralist' accounts, the book examines the constitutional role of the civil service and its part in policy-making. This combination of the theories of bureaucracy with an account of the modern-day civil service will be essential reading for students of British politics and for civil servants themselves.