The Political Parties

In our early work we have argued that the state’s administrative apparatus was driven by a bureaucratic dynamic with its own broad policy preferences which it would pursue regardless of the party in office (Salter and Tapper, 1981). Then, in Power and Policy in Education we explored the nature of the party input to policy-making on private schooling, the important role of intellectuals and ideology in that process and the inevitable, but negotiable, tensions between party policies and the ambitions of the state bureaucracy.