MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Ministerial responsibility is associated with Parliamentary
systems of government.
Ministerial responsibility is the convention that a
minister is answerable to Parliament for the conduct and actions of his or her ministry's
personnel.
Originally, the ministerial responsibility was quite
strictly imposed on a minister and resignation might be demanded even where the minister
did not have, and could not reasonably have been expected to have, knowledge of improper
or negligent acts or omissions by officials.
In recent times, this idea has been abandoned and it is
rare for a minister to accept ministerial responsibility and resign.
Responsible Government and Ministerial
Responsibility: Every Reform Is Its Own Problem - The
article defends the classical version of ministerial responsibility against recent
initiatives to implement a form of direct accountability for administrators.
Constitutional convention and ministerial resignations from active cabinets in the
Canadian federal government and in Britain are described: in neither country do ministers
resign for maladministration by their officials, nor does doctrine suggest they should.
Rather, the pattern of resignations indicates the importance of collective responsibility,
as well as the relative unimportance of ministerial misbehaviour.
The conclusion sets out the negative implications for
democratic government of substituting a kind of direct "accountability" of
officials, extracted in political forums, for the responsibility of ministers. - S. L.
Sutherland, Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique,
Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1991) - jstor.org
A Critical evaluation of Ministerial Responsibility in
supervising Administrative decisions, M Kats
With the proliferation of the bureaucracy, and the emerging importance of new
administrative review procedures, ministerial responsibility has been accused of being
left behind, as a monolithic incomprehensible convention. However the paper reports on the
findings of several Senate Select Committees and Commissions, secondary material in which
ministerial responsibility is relevant today, and criticisms of its strict hierarchy are
no longer valid. Research has shown that ministerial responsibility is able to incorporate
other bodies of review, and thus allow greater accountability to the public. Accordingly,
the new public service management was shown to contain few benefits to the public. -
foi.law.utas.edu.au/ active/abstracts/abstracts/1997Tas49PPL.html
From Administrative State to Ministerial System: The Quest
for Accountability in Hong Kong - Author: Kwok R.
Abstract: In an attempt to enhance the public accountability of principal officials, Hong
Kong has replaced civil servants with politically appointed 'ministers' to be in charge of
policy portfolios. Such ministers will henceforth shoulder political responsibility for
policy and administrative fiascos. This paper argues that in the deliberations on
ministerialisation, the local discourse has not sufficiently appreciated the complexities
and uncertainties in both the theory and practice of ministerial responsibility. It
highlights the mistake of concentrating almost exclusively on ministerial resignation as a
mechanism for enforcing government accountability, and of overlooking explanatory
accountability as a core tenet of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. It points to
the impotence of pursuing government accountability in the absence of transparent
government, and argues for access to information legislation as a prerequisite for the
meaningful discharge of ministerial responsibility. - ingentaconnect.com
UK Ministerial Responsibility in 2002: The Tale of Two Resignations - Diana Woodhouse
The resignations in 2002 of Stephen Byers and Estelle Morris (UK Secretaries of State for
Transport and Education respectively) suggest the need to review the constitutional and
political aspects of resignation. In both cases, ministers recognized that they had failed
in the oversight or supervision of their departments and thus in the fulfilment of their
ministerial role. Their resignations therefore provide evidence of a move away from
'causal responsibility', with its complication of the policy/operations and
accountability/responsibility distinctions, towards 'role responsibility'. In so doing,
they raise the possibility that what are commonly understood as 'departmental fault'
resignations may be more appropriately subsumed within an expanded category of personal
fault. The resignations also challenge Finer's thesis on the conditions that need to be
meet for a resignation to be forthcoming. In neither instance was the political party out
for blood or the prime minister unbending. In both cases the press was relentless,
suggesting that the media has become a prime actor in determining resignation, and the
minister yielding, a recognition, perhaps, of constitutional principle over political
pragmatism. - blackwell-synergy.com
Mechanisms of judicial accountability in British central government
M Flinders, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
The effectiveness of ministerial responsibility to Parliament as a sufficient check on the
actions of ministers and officials is widely doubted. This article considers the utility
of judicial forms of accountability and whether these mechanisms, to a greater or lesser
extent, off-set the deficiencies commonly associated with the convention of ministerial
responsibility. The first section offers a brief consideration of a number of
constitutional, historical and theoretical issues. The second examines the impact of
judicial accountability on central government. Exploring three distinct processes
(judicial review, European Convention on Human Rights cases and judicial inquiries), it
draws upon the wider literature and available research to evaluate the positive and
negative aspects of each mechanism. The final section concludes that judicial forms of
accountability have not evolved to remedy the shortcomings commonly identified with
ministerial responsibility to Parliament. However, it is suggested that the constitutional
equilibrium is changing and the role of the courts in relation to the executive may change
dramatically in the (near) future. - pa.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/1/54
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