Political Executive Control of the Administrative State: How Much is Too Much?

Conor Casey

The relationship between the administrative state and political executive in constitutional democracies is typically channeled through a sub- constitutional version of checks and balances. The competing roles and work of a diverse cast of actors, including politicians, political appointees, and independent civil servants, all ensure a workable accommodation between important values and principles important to such systems, including democratic accountability, efficacious governance for the common good, technocratic expertise, and commitment to the rule of law. But for some, this picture is under threat across many constitutional systems, in situations where political executives are said to increasingly enjoy the balance of control and power over the capacity of the administrative state apparatus, through deploying an array of legal and political tools to centralize and politicize its work to better align it with their ideology and political objectives.

In some systems, political executives attempt to bolster their ability to steer a bureaucracy in an ideological direction, sometimes significantly, but without severely eroding its overall bureaucratic autonomy and independence. But in others, executive control over bureaucracy effectively amounts to its capture, a quasi-revolutionary transformation that seriously alters how public power is channeled and exercised in the state. In this form, the political executive has greater capacity to promote its ideological agenda through the bureaucratic apparatus while severely reducing bureaucratic autonomy and scope for civil servants to act as an internal check, capable of challenging or obstructing executive policies.

Despite its importance for how public power is allocated and exercised, this phenomenon is surprisingly underexplored from a comparative or theoretical constitutional perspective. To begin the process of offering critical and comparative analysis, this Essay draws eclectically on a range of constitutional systems, both parliamentary and presidential, to highlight the different kinds of legal and political tools available to political executives striving to exercise greater control over the administrative state.