Defining Boundaries: The Constitutional Argument for Bureaucratic Independence and Its Implication for the Accountability of the Public Service
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the constitutional boundaries which establish the basis for relations between the political and bureaucratic spheres of government. Some suggest the boundaries between Ministers and political staff on the one hand (who I will refer to together as “the political executive”), and public service managers, public officials and line employees of government on the other hand (who I refer to collectively as the “public service”), are matters of political expediency rather than constitutional principle. I believe the primacy of political expediency has created a climate with insufficient safeguards against political interference in public service decision-making. In my view, recognizing the primacy of constitutional principle would be a salutary and constructive response to the Sponsorship Affair and ought to underpin any recommendations aimed at preventing incursions against the nonpartisan character of the public service in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".