Ministerial Reshuffles and the Civil Service

The relationship between ministers and the senior civil servants with whom they are in closest contact has long fascinated students of British government. For all the attention lavished on it, however, the relationship remains obstinately elusive and unsusceptible to clear categorization and analysis. The problem is partly one of finding a suitable frame of reference. Despite their well-established limitations, the Weberian model of an instrumental bureaucracy and the closely-related ‘politics-administration dichotomy’ still loom surprisingly large in academic analyses of bureaucratic behaviour. But the attempt to specify roles appropriate to civil servants, on the one hand, or ministers, on the other, runs the risk either of proving inadequate in face of the empirical evidence or of leading to the conclusion that one of the groups – usually the civil servants – is usurping the other's role or roles. Elements of the latter can be seen in the concern evinced in recent years about the power of civil servants vis-à-vis ministers in Britain. (Discussion of minister-civil servant relationships has, indeed, been almost entirely confined to aspects of power – particularly that of the minister's ability to get his way on policy.)