Understanding and explaining civil service reform: A reply to Dowding and James

Dowding and James's response to our critique of the bureau-shaping model makes some important criticisms that we welcome.(1) However, we suggest that they ignore the empirical evidence we presented in our original article (because of their narrow definition of acceptable data) and we believe that they misunderstand our arguments because of the positivist paradigm within which they operate. Our response covers three main issues – epistemology, methods and evidence.

(1) D. Marsh, D. Richards and M. J. Smith, ‘Bureaucrats, Politicians and Reform in Whitehall: Analysing the Bureau-shaping Model’, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 461–82.