Where does the decision making power lie in the British executive: with the Prime Minister, the Cabinet or the Civil service?

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The Executive

Where does the decision making power lie in the British executive: with the Prime Minister, the Cabinet or the Civil service?

To understand the relative distribution of power inside the British executive we must define the Executive and it's role; Rhodes provides a useful definition of the Core Executive as 'all those organisations and procedures which co-ordinate central government, and act as the final arbiters of conflict between different parts of the government machine.' The domain of the question covers only three groups of actors inside the Executive set and they must be identified to make useful progress.

The identity of the first actor is self-evident being the incumbent prime minister yet the second and third groups require more careful explanation. The Cabinet is broadly identified as the group of senior ministers with responsibility for a specific department and who meet with the Prime Minister on a regular basis. Ministers without portfolio shall also be considered as part of the Cabinet but they are not as numerous as the first group. The Civil Service is the most nebulous of the actors in the question and our investigation could extend to the most junior ranks of the organisation. However this would be of limited value in respect to the question, which concerns decision making power or input rather than those Civil Servants who purely implement decisions. As such I shall only consider those members of the Service who have a substantial input into policy formulation and consultation.

The definition of the actors in the essay gives us a population of actors to focus upon, but no basis upon which to judge the allocation and relative magnitude of power. Power in the context of making decision should be judged on three criteria; the importance of the decision influenced, the strength of influence and the number of decisions made. The process of power quantification and analysis is complicated by external and internal factors. External agencies intrude into the aggregate power base of the identified actors and therefore the sum power fluctuates, this outward flow of power is important as some actors may lose disproportionately more power after certain developments. Internal interdependence complicates the identification of discrete power nodes but power can be located when decisions are made in disagreement between the actors by identifying the 'winning' party.

The tense is also important in the area of focus for the essay, the question specifies the distribution of power between the current Prime Minister, cabinet and Civil Service and this strict reading of the question may lead us to pass over events in more distant history. However the question identifies institutions and offices rather than personalities, the conventions regulating the interaction of these groups has evolved over a long period and thus to identify the current distribution of power we must adopt a historical perspective.

Taking a series of snapshot historical perspectives may make us over emphasise the importance of individuals in analysing power, only by mapping broader trends in institutional reform (which may be enacted by individuals) will we develop an impression of the relationships between groups rather than personalities. This avenue of investigating institutional relationships seems preferable to a very detailed study of personal relationships where trends are harder if not impossible to identify.
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The basis of my initial argument shall rest on the most established model of Core Executive interactions: the Westminster Model was proposed by Jennings in 1966 to explain the distribution of power. The model was constructed around the central premise of Parliamentary sovereignty; that each parliament had the right to make decisions on almost any issue and enforce them. The notion of Parliamentary sovereignty also allows the current parliament to rescind any previous legislation or decision. The evidence supporting this premise was both constitutional and conventional, the latter being very important in the absence of a complete codified ...

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