ABSTRACT
Why look at the administrative machinery at all? In particular ways which will be analysed in this chapter, the public administration determines policy through its capacity to subject substantive policy to the constraints of formal routine and of partisan determination. Italy’s ‘partyocracy’, in other words, is expressed through a bureaucracy which though intensely politicised in some areas is able to maintain the impersonal formality of procedure in others. In general terms, the greater the degree of independence of the bureaucracy, the more likely we are to identify policy communities of relatively strong and cohesive professional interests. The more prevalent is the partisan mode of policy, the more likely we are to find the issue networks and the exchange processes associated with them. The critical qualification to this argument is that where the independence is greatest, it may rely on factors such as fragmentation of structure and legalism of procedures which mitigate against the development of policy communities.
