The Government An Introduction To The Cabinet System In Ireland

This title offers a fresh and sustained scrutiny of the Irish system of national government. It examines the cabinet, the departments of finance and the Taoiseach, ministerial relationships with civil servants, the growth and decline of agencies and the courts.

This book was originally published in 1934. Its aim is to discover and explain the underlying principles at work in the political structure of the Irish Free State. It is an analysis and examination of Democracy, in the light of more than twelve years of practical experience, the peculiar virtues and vices which Representative Government has displayed in the country.

There is a great difficulty in the way of a writer who attempts to sketch a living Constitution-a Constitution that is in actual work and power. The difficulty is that the object is in constant change. An historical writer does not feel this difficulty: he deals only with the past; he can say definitely, the Constitution worked in such and such a manner in the year at which he begins, and in a manner in such and such respects different in the year at which he ends; he begins with a definite point of time and ends with one also. But a contemporary writer who tries to paint what is before him is puzzled and a perplexed: what he sees is changing daily. He must paint it as it stood at some one time, or else he will be putting side by side in his representations things which never were contemporaneous in reality.

Building on the success of the first two editions, Politics in the Republic of Ireland continues to provide an authoritative introduction to all aspects of politics in the Irish Republic.

Making and Breaking Governments offers a theoretical argument about how parliamentary parties form governments, deriving from the political and social context of such government formation its generic sequential process. Based on their policy preferences, and their beliefs about what policies will be forthcoming from different conceivable governments, parties behave strategically in the game in which government portfolios are allocated. The authors construct a mathematical model of allocation of ministerial portfolios, formulated as a noncooperative game, and derive equilibria. They also derive a number of empirical hypotheses about outcomes of this game, which they then test with data drawn from most of the postwar European parliamentary democracies. The book concludes with a number of observations about departmentalistic tendencies and centripetal forces in parliamentary regimes.