ABSTRACT
There is a broad consensus that public administrations are as much a ‘product’ as a ‘characteristic feature’ of what we call the ‘state’.1 In all phases of the state’s formation2 the changes in its characteristics are closely linked with respective developments in public administrations.3 Given this salience, research into the role of public administration has been and is of considerable extent and density. Several works in the 1980s4 have dismantled the Weberian model of bureaucracy,5 stressing that ‘bureaucracies are involved at every stage in public policy-making’6 and the more ‘co-operative’ relations between politicians, interest groups and civil servants.7
