ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how governments interact with the bureaucracy in Europe: how they try to get their policies implemented: and how the bureaucracy helps or hinders them. It describes the operation of party government and its interactions with bureaucracy. A party's mandate is its right and responsibility to carry through the policy programme which it put before electors at the previous election, and which attracted the votes which gave it the ability to form or enter government. Legitimacy is the recognition of your right to get something done and to ask for help to do it because its programme has been endorsed by the electorate; a government has a right, recognized by parliament and bureaucracy, to have it affected, whether by legislation or administrative action. The original service nobility was replaced by a more technical and professional bureaucracy in the nineteenth century, but the tradition of regarding bureaucratic position as a secure job, or an opportunity for personal aggrandisement, remained.
