ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss cross-national comparisons of managerial cultures and looks at various dimensions of political culture, such as the degrees of system trust, political efficacy and citizen involvement. It focuses on public attitudes towards the range and scope of government activities and examines cultural patterns in both the British and German societies, which may help to explain the conspicuous differences in the national policy programmes for public sector reform. The professional civil service in Germany appears to be one of the strongholds of traditional public sector management. The streamlined profiles of the British ‘civic culture’ and the German ‘subject culture’ seem to be less than complete. In Germany, public support for ‘big government’ appears to have declined since the ‘social-democratic’ 1970s, though showing no clear evidence of any widespread wish to significantly redraw the boundaries of the state.
