The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State
Joseph HeathThe central challenge involves reconciling the tension between the traditional commitment to political neutrality on the part of the civil service with the fact that administrative discretion inevitably involves making normative judgments. State employees are in many cases unable to do their job effectively without some conception of where the public interest lies. It seems inevitable that this will conflict with the commitment to political neutrality, since this conception of the public interest may be tension with that of elected officials. The solution to the dilemma lies in an understanding of the constraints that liberalism imposes upon popular sovereignty in a liberal-democratic polity. Not only do courts play an important role in checking the power of democratic publics, the executive branch is also the custodian of certain fundamental liberal principles"--