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Ministers, Civil Servants and the Constitution1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Vernon Bogdanor
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Extract

Sammy Finer Contributed To so Many Areas of political science – comparative government, international relations, sociological theory, electoral studies – that it is often forgotten that his first love was public administration, the subject of his first two books, his Primer of public Administration, published in 1950 and his biography of Sir Edwin Chadwick published in 1952. In addition, Sammy published a seminal article on ‘The Individual Responsibiity of Ministers’ in the journal Public Administration in 1956.

In that article, written in the aftermath of the Crichel Down controversy, Sammy refuted what he called the ‘folklore’ that surrounded the principle of individual responsibility, showing that there was no convention of resignation for administrative fault, and that, in any case, resignation was an ineffective remedy for departmental mismanagement.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 29 , Issue 5 , 01 December 1994 , pp. 676 - 695
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1994

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on the 1993 annual lecture to the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, London University. I am grateful to the Institute and to Professor Terence Daintith, its director, both for asking me to deliver the lecture, and for allowing me to use some of the material from it.

References

2 The Civil Service at the Crossroads’, Political Quarterly, 1985, p. 230.

3 Evidence given to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee inquiry into ‘Civil Servants and Ministers’, HC 92, 1985–6, Para. 4. 13.

4 Finer, S. E., A Primer of Public Administration, London, Frederick Muller, 1950, p. x.Google Scholar