Whitehall's Disobedient Servants? Senior Officials' Potential Resistance to Ministers in British Government Departments

Anthony Barker and Graham K. Wilson

British Journal of Political Science, 1997, vol. 27, issue 2, 223-246

Abstract: British civil servants have a clear constitutional duty to obey their ministers. Yet civil servants may be confronted with situations in which they believe, on the basis of their knowledge or expertise, that the course of action a minister favours would have sharply damaging consequences for the government or the country. What should higher civil servants do then? We use data gathered in two rounds of interviews with senior civil servants (Grades 1–3) in 1989–90 and 1993–94 to explore how far civil servants feel able to go in challenging either inappropriate ministerial requests for services or policies they believe to be sharply damaging. Senior civil servants are divided on the appropriate course of action in such circumstances.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:27:y:1997:i:02:p:223-246_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in British Journal of Political Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().