Miranda v. Arizonajudgment) as long ago as 1966, studies have shown hundreds
of police forces throughout the country ignoring them. Almost all studies of
industrial pay in Europe show that women do not, in general, benefit from
statutory rights to equal pay. Only complex and powerful enforcement
mechanisms can actually guarantee that ade jureright becomes ade factoone.
Civil Service
The civil service of a country is its public administration, the body of men and
women employed by the state to implement policy and apply the laws and
regulations made by theexecutiveandlegislature. It usually also includes a
small e ́lite group of senior public officers who help the official political leaders
to draft laws and translate policies into practical forms. All governments rely on
a civil service of some sort, but finding a clear operational definition that
distinguishes the public administrators from the politicians is often extremely
difficult. The phrase is itself somewhat culture-bound, since it is used and
understood mainly in Britain and its ex-colonies, most notable among which,
of course, is the USA. There is no equivalent to the concept of civil service in
continental Europe; the idea that senior officers of the state are servants of the
public, which is one connotation of the English phrase, has no place in the
political culture of, say, the French Republic. (Originally, civil servants were
simply officers of the Crown who were employed in a non-military capacity.)
In its full sense, ‘civil service’ is only a meaningful phrase in a democratic
society, where it is possible to draw a clear distinction between the politicians,
who are elected to office and must face re-election from time to time, and civil
servants who are appointed to offices which they will hold, subject to good
behaviour, in the same way as any other employed person. A corollary of this is
that the civil service itself has no right to issue laws and regulations, or to make
policy: they exist only to advise and carry out the instructions of their political
masters, and are usually supposed to be non-partisan. In practice these ideals
are seldom achieved. Civil services everywhere have a great deal of political
power, if only because governments are often totally dependent on their
advice, and a combination of time pressure and the technical nature of
legislation makes it difficult for politicians to question or check on the advice
given by the civil service. In addition, the complexity of human problems for
which legislation exists means that quite junior civil servants inevitably have to
exercise considerable discretion in dealing with individual cases, whether these
be tax matters, welfare payments or local planning permission.
This having been said, in many countries there is little or no pretence that
the upper levels of the public administration are non-partisan. In the USA
senior appointments are used directly for political patronage. In Italy, the most
Civil Service