Ministers, Civil Servants and the Constitution

Abstract

Sammy Finer Contributed To so Many Areas of political science – comparative government, international relations, sociological theory, electoral studies – that it is often forgotten that his first love was public administration, the subject of his first two books, his Primer of public Administration, published in 1950 and his biography of Sir Edwin Chadwick published in 1952. In addition, Sammy published a seminal article on ‘The Individual Responsibiity of Ministers’ in the journal Public Administration in 1956.In that article, written in the aftermath of the Crichel Down controversy, Sammy refuted what he called the ‘folklore’ that surrounded the principle of individual responsibility, showing that there was no convention of resignation for administrative fault, and that, in any case, resignation was an ineffective remedy for departmental mismanagement.