Thatcher Reagan Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy

Sara Stratton teaches history at York University.

With the election of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Brian
Mulroney, the 1980s saw the consolidation of a new conservatism in
Western politics. This book focuses on the Conservative attack on
government bureaucracy during that period.

Margaret Thatcher came to office determined to downsize the government,
make it more efficient, and reassert political control over the civil
service. She cut more than 169,000 jobs (22 percent of the service).
Reagan proposed to “drain the swamp,” and in his first two and a
half years in office cut 92,000 jobs and crushed the air traffic
controller’s union. Mulroney’s promise to hand out “pink slips and
running shoes” was kept for about 4000 federal employees. The civil
service’s method of doing business was also revamped, as the
principles of private-sector management were applied to the public
sector, creating a bureaucracy that managed rather than administered
policy. Policy was now dictated in partisan terms. While Savoie does not
see the civil service as flawless, he does not feel that these reforms
have been useful or effective. Downsizing and managerialism did nothing
to correct the inertia that Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney saw in the
public sector, and they did nothing to facilitate the exchange of ideas
that is necessary for good policy formation. As Savoie says, this
approach “did not encourage officials to sit back, to think, to read,
to reflect, and to come up with proposals for change.”

Savoie is careful to make distinctions among, as well as grand
comparisons of, the three governments. This is a clearly argued,
well-organized, and engagingly written analysis of the New Right, and is
recommended for any student of comparative politics.