Jonathan Craft and John Halligan, Advising Governments in the Westminster Tradition: Policy Advisory Systems in Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 274 pp. £75 (Hardback) ISBN: 9781108421492

• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Author: Heath Pickering
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13531

778 Public Administration Review • July | A ugus t 202 2

Jonathan Craft and John Halligan, Advising Governments in

the Westminster Tradition: Policy Advisory Systems in

Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2020). 274 pp. £75 (Hardback)

ISBN: 9781108421492

A

key ingredient of policy capacity is the

provision of high-quality policy advice. To

research policy advice, however, comparativists

are challenged by both differences in the sources

and types of advice across time and countries. In an

ambitious comparative study, Advising Governments

in the Westminster Tradition, Jonathan Craft and John

Halligan examine Policy Advisory Systems (PAS) in

Australia, Britain, Canada, and NewZealand.

The introduction of PAS as a concept is commonly

attributed to Seymour-Ure(1987) as an attempt

to better understand policy formulation and policy

advice processes from cross-national and cross-

sectoral variations where previous modes of thinking

commonly focused on one specific set of actors in

isolation from other actors. Through the 1990s

to today, Halligan(1995, 2004, 2020), and more

recently Craft (Craft & Halligan,2017; Craft &

Howlett,2012) have now encouragingly encapsulated

the rich body of literature in a standalone book, where

PAS has incrementally developed primarily through

book chapters and journal articles (including a special

issue in Policy Sciences (Hustedt & Veit,2017) Policy

advisory systems: change dynamics and sources of

variation).

Reviewed by: Heath Pickering

KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium

Heath Pickering is a doctoral candidate at

the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute.

His dissertation investigates how and

why political advisers in ministers’ offices

have become institutionalized, in varying

levels of intensity, across countries of the

Westminster administrative tradition.

Email: heath.pickering@kuleuven.be

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 4, pp. 778–780. © 2022 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13531.