A sustained period of Conservative government would normally be expected to usher in constitutional stability. But the reverse was largely true for the period 2010-24. During these years constitutional controversies were rarely far from the news, partly thanks to deliberately planned changes, but mostly due to radically shifting conventions and political behaviour. Across the time period, the direction of change was also very far from consistent. The initial coalition years were marked primarily by pressures towards greater constitutional pluralism, though Liberal Democrat reform ambitions were often held back by Cameron’s Conservatives. Later, any prospect of calm under single-party government was soon punctured by the pressures of Brexit. This eventually brought into question almost every aspect of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, and inflicted painful splits within the Conservative Party over questions of governance. In particular, Boris Johnson’s populist approach was characterised by wholesale disregard for constitutional norms, and highlighted vulnerabilities in the UK’s key democratic arrangements which few would previously have anticipated. If one commonality can be discerned across this fourteen-year period of constitutional extremes, it is the largely unconservative nature of policy.

Bashing bureaucrats is an old American political tradition, and no one took this further than Donald Trump, who actively sought to fire civil servants and find other ways to subvert the bureaucracy. Over the nation’s history, the government has taken on an increasing and successful role in ensuring prosperity, protecting people, and promoting equality, and this success is due in no small part to the contribution of civil servants. Like all institutions, the government fails because its employees let it down, but it also fails because of incompetent political leaders who ignore the advice of knowledgeable and experienced civil servants or reject their advice because it conflicts with an ideological agenda. Andrew Jackson famously thought running the government did not require any special skills, and Donald Trump went even further in thinking that he did not need to know anything about how the government ran or what the civil service advised. The results were disastrous for both presidents and the country. Government needs administration, especially in times of emergency, and government needs public servants like Anthony Fauci to carry out its programs.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Treasury rose, and then rose again in its place in the twentieth, and rose again in the twenty-first century, to become, the biggest single challenge to the authority of the prime minister. No longer subordinate at all. Naked power, ambition, the knowledge that some were virtually unsackable, command over the purse and the backing of the mighty resource of the Treasury compared to the puny No. 10, ensured that Chancellors could be a power to themselves, strutting around Westminster and Whitehall at times like an overmighty baron in medieval England, making the job of prime minister at times impossible. Reaching this elevated position was not preordained, as we shall see in this chapter, and occurred through seven successive pulses, each associated with a commanding figure, usually the Chancellor, who has shaped the office, much as our landmark prime ministers have done to their own office. There are three great contemporary problems with the Treasury: its handicapping of the prime minister in shaping government strategy, its prioritising of financial over economic policy, and a diminishing role of Parliament in its oversight, have all had long roots.

The chapter begins by describing the presidents relations with Congress, backed the threat of presidential vetoes on one side and impeachment on the other. It then traces the rise of the federal bureaucracy as an independent policymaker, asking whether and to what extent presidential power, rule of law norms, and bureaucratic incentives can ensure broadly democratic outcomes. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the Presidents War Powers, the dynamics of wartime elections, and the Executives alarming authority to impose emergency measures without Congress.

Modern states rely on the quality of their civil service. In the case of Tanzania, this chapter points to four key weaknesses: capacity, motivation and conduct, political interference, and resources and tools. Capacity and resources clearly depend on the level of economic development. From an institutional point of view, motivation and political interference play the most important role as they ultimately define the rules according to which the civil service, the political apparatus, and the private sector interact. The chapter maintains that the main factor behind these two weaknesses is the relationship betwwen civil servants and politicians, and recommends unplugging the civil service from political patronage through a transparent system of performance evaluation and promotion to senior positions, as well as a strengthening of the role and power of the Civil Service Commission. It also recognises that such a reform is unlikely to succeed unless supported by top politicians. While concurring with the need for this kind of reform, Jan Willem Gunning stresses in his comments the necessity to consider the political economy and the way in which compensation can be sought for losers.

This chapter explores the role of the Executive in the collaborative constitutional scheme, examining the modes and mechanisms of Executive engagement with rights under the UK Human Rights Act 1998. Emphasising that the role of the Executive is to initiate and drive forward new policy, this chapter puts the Executive in the driving seat of the collaborative constitution. However, it also uncovers a ’plural Executive’, highlighting the multiplicity of constitutional actors working within the Executive branch. Therefore, the chapter foregrounds the importance of an ’internal separation of powers’ within the Executive branch, highlighting the dialectical tension between differently oriented actors. Following a close analysis of Executive rights vetting under the HRA, the chapter concludes with an argument that we should imagine an Executive constitutionalism. At the very least, this chapter calls on constitutional scholars not to exclude the Executive in their pictures of constitutional government.

Chapter 6 considers the transformation of competition in the political sphere and the functions of the state. While prefigured in British politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like the modern company the modern political party and party systems first emerged in the young US, largely in the same period. Despite early condemnation of parties and factions by political leaders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson), within a few decades the modern party system had taken shape, emerging out of more rough-and-tumble, quasi-militarised factionalism, before spreading to Europe as democracy supplanted aristocracy across the nineteenth century. The chapter also briefly examines the rise of adversarial law, and the replacement of patronage by competitive examinations for government appointment, as two further examples of the state’s institutionalisation of conflict through formalised competition.

“Loyalty and Suspicion: The Making of the Civil Service after Independence” compares how colonial classifications of identity according to loyalty and suspicion were used by bureaucracies in the new states to define the administrators themselves and to shape the making of the civil services. Purification committees to vet former civil servants of Mandate Palestine, campaigns that designated certain types of corruption as disloyalty, and the explosive fight over representation by ratio in Cyprus were all carried out along the graded axis of suspicion. The chapter follows how political affiliation, mobility, and identity shaped perceptions of loyalty and belonging to the civil service that, in turn, dramatically delineated the boundaries of citizenship through mundane and routine practices of appointment and selection in the transition from colonial rule to independence.

In Chapter 2 we examined the sources of constitutional rules within the UK’s governance order. We established the importance of Acts of Parliament, which can be used to override other rules and have not, in the UK’s history as a state, been challenged by the courts. The theoretical relationship between constitutional sources, however, provides a distorted picture of the workings of the UK Constitution, and this section therefore explores the workings of the institutions of central government in the UK. This chapter concentrates upon the executive branch of government and how this branch has achieved a dominant position within the UK Constitution, both in spite of and because of parliamentary sovereignty. We begin by charting how the modern executive managed to accrue powers shed by a declining monarchy and proceed to analyse how the politicised elements of the executive branch were able to harness the party system and support of the civil service to exert control over Parliament.

Petty corruption breaks the rules, grand corruption writes the rules, cronyism basks in virtue. 1980s globalisation incited a corruption eruption in the periphery which spilled over back into the core in the 1990s. The United States narrowed its notion of corruption, which now engulfs politics, finance, law enforcement, and the Supreme Court. In Europe, an integrity revolution in the nineteenth century established impartial governance. It began under the ancien régime, and replaced patronage with expertise. Its ideal type of a Weberian bureaucracy, an elite corps of expert and honest administrators, was established in north-western Europe by 1870, and underpinned the capacity for war and constructive state action. Its efficiency was based on expert, impartial, and trustworthy competence. Official elites came into conflict with the forces of modernity, with democracy and the market. Their success led to over-extension, and the dilution of bureaucracy exposed it to its enemies.

Because of the economic power of incumbent firms and the political power of multiple veto players, changes to the developmental state were usually incremental.This contributed to the protagonism of the civil service as a change agent. Drawing on three case studies, the chapter illustrates how epistemic communities within the bureaucracy guided a variety of innovations across unconnected policy arenas: fiscal, health, and anti-corruption. Although policy innovation by the bureaucracy was incremental, slow, and often restricted to particular “islands of excellence” within the archipelago of state agencies, it was nonetheless essential to the most important accomplishments of the past generation. Civil service incrementalism, however, may have made change away from the overarching systemic equilibrium of the developmental state less likely, by exacerbating the fiscal quandary, sustaining the coalitional presidential system, and suppressing demands for more radical reform.

The chapter traces the origins of Roman civil service and the office of the scriba in Etruscan models and tries to understand the workings of decurial organisation, i.e. the recruitment, assignment and organisation of the public scribal apparitores. It postulates a high susceptibility of the system to the Roman phenomenon of patronage and social relations.

The chapter serves both as a summary of the classical model of scriba-ship established throughout the book and as an epilogue to the history of the scribae in the Later Roman Empire and beyond. It follows the sparse traces of scribae and revivals of the post in the institutions of the Late Roman state. It argues for the pervasive nature of the idea of the scriba using the example of a public scribe in the Ostrogothic Kingdom of the seventh century.