Top Officials and the Interface between Political and Operational

Abstract

Attention turns in this chapter to the implications of constrained autonomy for senior officials.1 Public-policy and public-choice literature assigns considerable scope to the top officials in the executive to shape their world, behave strategically, or finesse their situations according to their own interests, and so on (Dunleavy, 1991; Page, 1992). Whether it be the traditional model of civil servant ‘mandarins’, or the managerialist model of CEO-style civil servants, the top bureaucratic officials in leadership roles in large public-policy systems are often attributed extensive powers of autonomy in one way or another. However, the constraints of the system are often as powerful, and this means that we should be careful about exactly how much autonomy we attribute to these top officials who work at the interface between political and operational aspects of the system.