Bibliographic record
Abstract
The advent of a “third element” in the traditional dyadic relationship between executive politicians and top civil servants (Craft and Halligan 2017) has not gone unnoticed in the communities of public administration and policy scholars. The phenomenon of extending ministerial offices and growing numbers of ministerial advisers, sometimes called “special advisers” or “political advisers” who enter and leave their positions together with their political superiors, is generally understood as a response to executive politicians’ increased demand for political and policy capacity. But who and how powerful are aides and advisers at providing policy and political counsel to executive politicians? Two books explore the power of political advisers and their institutional fit within executive governments across established democracies of Europe and the Anglo-Westminster world. Ministers, Minders and Mandarins, edited by Richard Shaw and Chris Eichbaum, is a collection of 10 individual country cases authored by academics from at least four administrative traditions: Westminster, Napoleonic, Germanic, and Scandinavian. As the title suggests, the book examines the trilateral relationship between ministers, their advisers, and top civil servants, within what we might call “The Executive Triangle.” Yee-Fui Ng’s text, The Rise of Political Advisors in the Westminster System, is a comparative analysis of four classic Anglo-Westminster countries: the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Both books focus on the minister’s personal entourage and how this “special” subset of partisan-political civil servants influence and blur the lines between politics and bureaucracy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.004 |
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".