ADMINISTRATION IN TRANSITION An Analysis of the Civil Service

Traditionally, studies of British government have rested on the “Westminster model ” in which the United Kingdom is a unitary state. Increasingly, however, the model’s explanatory power has been que-ried. An alternative conception, the “differentiated polity model, ” has been developed and seeks to reflect the longstanding diversity that has characterized the institutions of British governance. One area of public administration that illustrates this variation is the civil service. The recent process of political devolution in the United Kingdom is already encouraging pressure for even greater distinctiveness and possibly separate civil service arrangements in Scotland and Wales. With particularly distinct govern-mental arrangements but still within the Britishmold, Northern Ireland offers both a vivid illustration of the differentiated polity model and a valuable indicator of how separate civil services might unfold else-where in the United Kingdom. With a combined population under one sixth of the United Kingdom’s total, the temptation to generalize and overlook experiences from its three smaller countries is understandable. Indeed, no major study of the British civil service has satisfacto-rily mapped the variations that have long existed across the United Kingdom since that of Gladden (1967). Differences invariably attract little more than footnote sta