ABSTRACT
Politics shapes administration and administration shapes politics. It seems that the administrative systems of the western world have proved to be more capable of change and innovation lately than the political systems. In the face of presumed bureaucratic inertia this is actually a remarkable observation. We face a neo-public management, reinvent government and encounter a new public administration, called ‘modern government’ or ‘government governance’. In the meantime the political systems are still very much operating under the traditional and well established principles of parliamentary sovereignty, representative democracy, electoral competition, party politics, left-right ideological differentiation-logically including a ‘third way’—and the primacy of politics over administration.
