ABSTRACT
Legislation is the stage at which public policy is formulated into compulsory mandates. These mandates are implemented in the administrative arena and overseen by regulatory agencies. In many Western democracies, those who implement legislative decisions are regarded as civil servants who are guided in their tasks by professional considerations attached to the skills of making policy work. In terms of political partisanship, they are entirely neutral and any discretion they may employ in their occupational labours relates to means whose ends have already been determined. Scholars have contested this model of democracy pointing to the temporary nature of elected officials as opposed to the entrenched position of the executive branch of government. Thus, putting aside democratic ideologies which embrace a “spoils system” approach in the holding of administrative office, modern bureaucracies professing dependence upon rules and regulations, both by virtue of their size, remoteness from policy formulators, and intrinsic constraints of field implementation, assume a leading role in policy determination.
