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The Prime Minister as Symbol: Unifier or Optimizer?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Frank Stark
Frank Stark
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Extract

One of the most interesting points raised in Thomas A. Hockin's introductory essay to Apex of Power was the apparent contradiction he noted between S.J.R. Noel's use of Arend Lijphart's consociational model to describe the “Canadian political network” and the cabinet, and George Szablowski's interpretation of the same political ralationship through the application of F.G. Bailey's models of transactional and bureaucratic leadership. “The traditional transactional interpretation of prime ministerial-cabinet relations emphasizes each Minister's personal (mostly regional) ‘representative’ role in getting into the Cabinet and explaining his leverage within it … It may be in keeping with S.J.R. Noel's identification of the necessary attributes of the consociational political network in this volume. Yet George Szablowski in this volume questions whether this transactional dynamic is not threatened in Cabinet by a policy-making system which, with the aid of programme budgeting and clear leadership from the Prime Minister in the Cabinet Committee on Priorities and Planning, emphasizes rationality and the supra-regional functions of policy.”

Type
Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 1973 , pp. 514 - 515
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1973

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References

1 “The Prime Minister and Political Leadership: An Introduction to Some Restraints and Imperatives”, in Apex of Power, ed. Hockin, Thomas A. (Scarborough, 1971), 13.Google Scholar

2 “The Prime Minister's Role in a Consociational Democracy,” in ibid., 107.

3 “The Optimal Policy-Making System: Implications for the Canadian Political Process,” ibid., 143.

4 Strategems and Spoils (New York, 1969), 82–3.

5 Stark, F., “Federalism as a Symbol of Political Integration in the Elite Political Culture of Cameroon,” PH D dissertation, Northwestern University, 1972.Google Scholar

6 “The Optimal Policy-Making System.”

7 See O'connell, James, “Political Integration, The Nigerian Case,” in African Integration and Disintegration, ed. Hazlewood, D. (London, 1967Google Scholar).