Partisan Appointees and Public Servants: An International Analysis of the Role of the Political Adviser

241 Pages·2010·3.04 MB·English

by  Chris Eichbaum

Partisan Appointees and Public Servants

Partisan Appointees
and Public Servants
An International Analysis of the Role of the
Political Adviser
Edited by
Chris Eichbaum
Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Victoria University of
Wellington, New Zealand
Richard Shaw
Associate Professor and Coordinator, Politics Programme,
Massey University, New Zealand
Edward Elgar
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
© Chris Eichbaum and Richard Shaw 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission of the publisher.
Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts
15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK
Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009937760
ISBN 978 1 84720 747 0
Printed and bound by MPG Books Group, UK
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0
Contents
List of contributors vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Chris Eichbaum and Richard Shaw
1. The United Kingdom 24
Paul Fawcett and Oonagh Gay
2. Canada 64
Peter Aucoin
3. Australia 94
Maria Maley
4. New Zealand 114
Chris Eichbaum and Richard Shaw
5. Ireland 151
Bernadette Connaughton
6. The United States 180
B. Guy Peters
Conclusion 198
Chris Eichbaum and Richard Shaw
Index 223
v

Contributors
Peter Aucoin is Eric Dennis Memorial Professor of Government and Political
Science and Professor of Public Administration at Dalhousie University,
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He has authored and edited 13 books and
authored over 80 articles and book chapters. He is currently on the edito-
rial boards of Governance, International Public Management Journal and
Public Management Review (UK). He prepared a report on deputy minister
(chief executive) staffi ng for the Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship
Program and Advertising Activities (the Gomery Commission).
Bernadette Connaughton lectures in public administration in the
Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick.
Her teaching and research interests include environmental policy and
administration, the impact of EU policy making on national administra-
tive systems, and political-administrative reform in a comparative per-
spective. Her publications include journal articles in Public Administration,
Regional and Federal Studies, Irish Political Studies and as co-author of
Europeanisation and New Patterns of Governance in Ireland (Manchester
University Press, forthcoming).
Chris Eichbaum is a Senior Lecturer (Public Policy) in the School of
Government at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has
worked in both the Australian Commonwealth and New Zealand public
service, and as a ministerial and Prime Ministerial adviser. With Richard
Shaw he has published extensively on the roles and responsibilities of
ministerial advisers in the executive branch of government and has an on-
going interest in the politics of central banking.
Paul Fawcett is a Lecturer in the Department of Government and
International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has
recently published a book chapter on central government in the UK (with
Rod Rhodes) and two separate research papers on special advisers and the
centre of government (with Oonagh Gay).
Oonagh Gay has worked in the House of Commons Library for 25 years,
currently heading the Parliament and Constitution Centre. She co-edited
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viii Partisan appointees and public servants
Conduct Unbecoming: The Regulation of Parliament Behaviour for the UK
Study of Parliament Group in 2004 and is the author of numerous articles
on electoral law and constitutional watchdogs.
Maria Maley is a Lecturer in Political Science in the School of Social
Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
She has published widely, based on her doctoral research on the roles of
Australian ministerial advisers in the period 1991–6. She has worked as a
public servant and a ministerial adviser.
B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of American Government
at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, and Professor of
Comparative Politics at Zeppelin University in Germany. He is founding
co-editor of the European Political Science Review, and Associate Editor
of the IPSA Encyclopedia of Political Science. His recent publications
include Debating Institutionalism (co-edited with Jon Pierre and Gerry
Stoker) and the Politics of Bureaucracy, 8th edition.
Richard Shaw is an Associate Professor in and Coordinator of the Politics
Programme at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. With
Chris Eichbaum he has published extensively on the roles and responsibili-
ties of ministerial advisers in the executive branch of government. He is
also – with Chris Eichbaum – coauthor of Public Policy in New Zealand:
Institutions, Processes and Outcomes (2008; Auckland: Pearson/Prentice
Hall).
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Professor John Wanna – the ANZSOG Foundation
Professor for the Sir John Bunting Chair of Public Administration based
at the Australian National University – who saw merit in a collection of
this kind, and on whose recommendation we approached Edward Elgar.
We would also like to acknowledge those colleagues and students who
have contributed in a variety of ways to debates about and discussions –
both scholarly and applied – on the issues traversed in this book. It is with
a sense of deep gratitude, too, that we thank Peter Aucoin, Bernadette
Connaughton, Paul Fawcett, Oonagh Gay, Maria Maley and B. Guy
Peters, each of whom has generously given of their time and intellect
to this collection. And we thank, without implicating in any way, those
whose past contributions to the disciplines that inform this collection
have encouraged critical refl ection on our own part and established such a
robust foundation for this contribution.
We would like to thank Catherine Elgar, Felicity Plester, Jenny Wilcox,
Bob Pickens and others at Edward Elgar without whose support, patience,
and expertise this collection would not have been possible.
Finally, we thank the members of our immediate and extended fam-
ilies for the many and varied ways in which they have aided us in this
endeavour.
Chris Eichbaum and Richard Shaw
A note from the editors
We are conscious that, by their very nature, political environments are
fl uid. Inevitably, this presents challenges to those attempting to capture
contemporary events and institutional changes. The chapters in this col-
lection were fi nalized towards the end of 2008, but the approach taken has
been to identify issues that will be of continuing relevance to academic and
practitioner communities going forward.
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