the legal power to make. Versions of this can come about where an official,
although entitled to use their discretion to make a decision, took account of
matters that ought to have been disregarded or ignored vital evidence.
Maladministration is dealt with in various ways in different jurisdictions.
The two most usual are through specialadministrative courts, or by the
use of some version of theombudsmansystem. An accusation of maladmin-
istration can have very serious consequences for a government, particularly
where, as in the United Kingdom, there is a doctrine of ministerialrespon-
sibility, in theory making a minister liable to have to resign for the actions of a
civil servant they may know nothing about.
Mandate
Mandates are typically claimed by successful parties in national elections even
when they have actually gained only a smallish plurality of votes. The claim is
that if a party, or a candidate, has stood for election on a particular set of
policies, then, having won election, a ‘mandate’ from the people has been
gained to implement those policies. Thus governments often claim that they
are ‘mandated’ to carry out some action even if there is no good reason to
believe that the policy in question had very much to do with their electoral
victory. The original meaning is where some body, perhaps a constituency
division of a political party or a trade-union branch, on being required to send
a representative to a national conference, gives the chosen representative
binding instructions to argue or vote in a fixed way on some particular issue.
The question of mandating a representative is a vital one in democratic theory.
One view holds that those who elect a representative are entitled to mandate
them to cast specific votes so as directly to represent the majority view in the
selecting body. An alternative to this is the theory ofdelegation, most
forcefully put by EdmundBurke, that selecting a representative (who may
in fact be an authorized candidate at a subsequent public election, perhaps as a
member of parliament) is a matter of choosing the best person one can find,
and then trusting that person’s judgement on issues that arise. Questions of
whether a mandate does or could exist, how much anyone is bound by it, and
when an election result would certify such a mandate are hotly-contested
matters of modern arguments about democracy both in parliaments and
parties. In Britain the doctrine of the mandate has another, more or less
constitutional, role, relating to the powers of the House of Lords. It is often
held that the Lords ought not to vote down legislation coming from the House
of Commons if it relates to a specific promise made in the government’s
previous electoralmanifesto.
Legally a mandate is a grant of authority to someone to do something
specific as the agent of a body entitled to do that act itself. After the First World
Mandate