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Politicians and Bureaucrats in Executive Government
Tobias Bach & Kai Wegrich
Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives, edited by Rudy B. Andeweg,
Robert Elgie, Ludger Helms, Juliet Kaarbo and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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Introduction
Without a permanent administrative apparatus that prepares and implements public policy,
political executives are unable to exercise political authority. They depend on the analytical,
regulatory, coordination, and delivery capacities of public organizations in order to effectively
and legitimately address pressing societal challenges and pursue their political agendas (Lodge
& Wegrich, 2014). This chapter focuses on the relationship between political executives
(presidents, prime ministers, cabinet and junior ministers), on the one hand, and policy
bureaucracies, on the other. We use the term policy bureaucracies for those organizations
variously labelled departments, ministries, or central agencies and primarily tasked with
developing and maintaining public policy (Page & Jenkins, 2005).
In constitutional terms, the relationship between political executives and policy
bureaucrats – public officials working in policy bureaucracies – is hierarchical in nature.
Political executives are either democratically elected or selected by the head of government,
either of which authorizes them to set the policy agenda within their sphere of responsibility
and to direct the administrative apparatus to pursue this agenda. At the same time, political
executives crucially depend on policy bureaucracies, which have both substantial policy
expertise and in-depth knowledge about the policymaking process. Moreover, political
executives’ information processing and conflict resolution capacities are limited, which means
they can only concentrate on a few flagship policies and handle the most pressing problems
(Scharpf, 1994). This combination of information asymmetries and capacity limitations
potentially turns actual power relations between political executives and policy bureaucracies
upside down. In consequence, political executives face a permanent challenge to ensure that
bureaucrats are responsive to their policy preferences.
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This chapter provides a review of the literature on the relationship between political
executives and policy bureaucrats and highlights theoretical perspectives and empirical
findings on how the tension between political control and bureaucratic power is addressed in
different contexts. To this end, the next section elaborates on three major research topics
concerning the relationship between political executives and policy bureaucracies by providing
a synopsis of substantial findings and research designs, followed by an overview of key
theoretical perspectives in the literature. The chapter then moves on to discuss emerging topics
in the contemporary literature before it sketches directions for future research on politicians
and bureaucrats in executive government around the world.
Politicians and bureaucrats in executive government: major research topics and
theoretical perspectives
This section discusses three interrelated but analytically distinct topics that constitute the core
of political science research on political executives’ relations with policy bureaucracies. The
first two topics – the recruitment and replacement of top officials, and the organization and
power of policy bureaucracies – share an analytical focus on how political executives deal with
the fundamental problem of ensuring the permanent bureaucracy’s responsiveness to their
policy preferences, but they emphasize different means (politicization, centralization) to
achieve this objective (Dahlström, Peters, & Pierre, 2011; Rudalevige, 2009). The third topic
is more concerned with understanding and explaining what happens in the ‘machine room’ of
executive government, asking how political and administrative policymakers interact and what
those processes tell us about the relative power of political executives and policy bureaucrats
('t Hart & Wille, 2006; Aberbach, Putnam, & Rockman, 1981; Page, 2012).
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The recruitment and replacement of top officials
The influence of politicians on personnel decisions (or its absence) in the public sector is a
long-standing topic in the study of public administration, as evidenced by a comprehensive
literature on ‘politicization’ and ‘patronage’ (Derlien, 1996; Hollibaugh, Horton, & Lewis,
2014; Hustedt & Salomonsen, 2014; Kopecký et al., 2016; Peters & Pierre, 2004). The starting
point of much of this literature is the well-known politics–administration dichotomy, which
goes back to the writings of Max Weber and Woodrow Wilson. Although addressing different
problems, both Weber and Wilson concluded that politics and administration, or more precisely
the careers of politicians and bureaucrats, should be separated (Sager & Rosser, 2009).
Although often mistaken as an advocate of bureaucratic organization, Weber argued that
politicians are needed to curb a potentially all-too-powerful bureaucracy. In contrast, Wilson
was concerned with the detrimental effects of the spoils system in the United States, in which
administrative positions were filled according to political rather than competency criteria.
There is now good empirical evidence that a close connection between administrative and
political careers has negative effects on good government and breeds corruption and
inefficiencies (Dahlström & Lapuente, 2017). However, this literature primarily focuses on
bureaucrats outside policy bureaucracies.
The most obvious manifestation of politicization of the bureaucracy is the existence of
positions within policy bureaucracies for which political executives have formal powers to
appoint or remove individuals. A widely used definition of formal politicization is ‘the
substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria in the selection, retention, promotion,
rewards and disciplining of members of the public service’ (Peters & Pierre, 2004, p. 2). An
important question in comparative research – both over time and between countries – is the
degree to which such formally politicized positions exist in policy bureaucracies (Page &
Wright, 1999). In studies of parliamentary systems where top-level positions are formally
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politicized, scholars usually consider partisan loyalty as the core political criterion for
appointing and replacing top officials and seek to describe and explain the occurrence of party
political backgrounds among top officials, based on biographical information (Dahlstro
̈m &
Niklasson, 2013; Derlien, 2003; Ennser-Jedenastik, 2016b; Veit & Scholz, 2016). Another
strand of research investigates the politicization of top officials by studying how political
change such as cabinet or minister turnover affects top officials’ turnover (Christensen,
Klemmensen, & Opstrup, 2014; Dahlström & Holmgren, 2017; Meyer-Sahling, 2008; Meyer-
Sahling & Veen, 2012), using event history analysis or descriptive analyses of the degree of
replacement of top officials.
The literature often takes the delegation problem in a principal–agent relationship as a
starting point, arguing that politicians cannot be sure that bureaucrats share their policy
preferences (Huber & Shipan, 2006). Not only do they have limited expertise, but they also
face important constraints on their capacity to oversee the bureaucracy. To avoid a ‘runaway
bureaucracy’ (McCubbins, Noll, & Weingast, 1987), politicians can staff key positions with
individuals that have policy priorities similar to their own (Lewis, 2008). By selecting
individuals loyal to their own political party, politicians can minimize the problem of adverse
selection – choosing a person without knowing for sure that they will act as intended. Those
‘allies’ will make sure that decisions are biased in favour of politicians’ preferences (Bach &
Veit, 2018; Dahlström & Holmgren, 2017). The appointment and replacement of top officials
are potentially powerful instruments of political control. Knowledge about whether and how
politicians use those instruments is fundamental for understanding the nature of democratic
governance, as politicians may also use their formal powers as a patronage tool to reward
loyalists with doubtful qualifications for the job at hand (Grindle, 2012; Kopecký et al., 2016).
More recently, scholars have started to investigate how political executives select (or
replace) top officials based on criteria other than partisan loyalty, including political and public
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management skills (Bach & Veit, 2018; Fleischer, 2016). Another typology of political
appointees’ qualifications distinguishes professionalism, political allegiance, and personal
loyalty as selection criteria (Kopecký et al., 2016). The question of why political executives
appoint political appointees, and more specifically what qualifications they look for, has been
studied most intensely in the US, where scholars have examined how presidents balance loyalty
and competence when selecting top officials (Hollibaugh et al., 2014; Lewis, 2008; Lewis &
Waterman, 2013; Ouyang, Haglund, & Waterman, 2017). A key argument in this literature is
that political executives (in this case, the US president) will consider different kinds of
qualifications depending on the type of post to be filled. Presidents may compromise on
professional competence for positions in organizations at the margins of their agenda, yet they
have strong incentives to appoint loyal and competent individuals to positions in high-priority
organizations. In contrast, few studies situated in other contexts explicitly address differential
patterns of politicization within the executive (Bach, Hammerschmid, & Löffler, 2018;
Christensen et al., 2014; Ennser-Jedenastik, 2016b; Kopecký et al., 2016). We will address this
emerging research theme more thoroughly in this chapter’s final section.
The organization and power of policy bureaucracies
The study of the relationship between political executives and policy bureaucrats is invariably
connected to the structure and organization of government. A key question in the literature is,
therefore, how policy bureaucracies are organized – and how this affects power relations
between politics and administration. The notion that organization affects power relations goes
back at least to Weber’s works on bureaucratic organization, which suggested that politicians
would always remain ‘dilettantes’ in comparison to expert bureaucracies. In his view, the
existence of a political leadership with a power base outside the bureaucracy, usually through
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an electoral mandate, is an important condition for curing the influence of bureaucracy.
Although political leaders differ in terms of their authority across countries (Page, 1992), the
basic condition for the exercise of political control over policy bureaucracies – having a
political rather than an administrative leadership – is usually fulfilled in modern democratic
states. What this perspective highlights, though, is the usefulness of looking at the power and
resources of political executives in order to understand power relations with bureaucracies.
More specifically, scholars working in this tradition have studied organizational and
procedural mechanisms for avoiding different kinds of ‘drift’ away from the wishes of elected
politicians by using the analytical toolbox of principal–agent models (Huber & Shipan, 2006).
There is a large body of literature on the political control of the federal bureaucracy in the US
that primarily addresses questions regarding congressional control over the bureaucracy and
the relative influence of the president and Congress over bureaucratic decision-making (see
Moe, 2012 for an overview). Hence, in terms of political control over bureaucracy, presidential
systems are characterized by a situation in which both the legislative and the executive branch
potentially face problems of political responsiveness among bureaucrats (Weingast, 2005).
This is different in parliamentary systems, where political executives are delegated authority
to govern by parliament. Having said that, another core area of research related to presidential
control of the bureaucracy are political appointments in the US federal bureaucracy (see below)
and the centralization of resources within the Executive Office of the President (Rudalevige,
2009). The different approaches of US presidents to increasing the political responsiveness of
the bureaucracy, which for instance also include the appointment of ‘policy czars’, are
discussed under the label of ‘administrative presidency’ and continuously attract the attention
of executive politics scholars (see Helms, 2017 for an overview of this literature).
In the context of parliamentary systems, questions about the organization of the
executive apparatus and political control of the bureaucracy have centred on the capacity of the
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political leadership relative to the permanent civil service. This debate is related to issues of
size in terms of relative numbers of political executives in a department, such as cabinet and
junior ministers or staff units such as ministerial cabinets in Austria, France, Belgium, and the
European Commission (Schnapp, 2004). A key topic in debates of the 1970s was the use of
planning units, based on the idea to increase capacities for long-term and comprehensive, cross-
sectoral policies (Fleischer, 2009). A related, more contemporary phenomenon is the increasing
use of special advisers who directly support the political executive but who (at least formally)
do not have any managerial authority within a department (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2008). This is
an emerging area of research, which we address in more detail below. The common
denominator of those topics is a focus on increasing the leadership capacity of political
executives vis-à-vis permanent bureaucracies as a means of improving political control.
Another organizational aspect is related to questions of coordination within the
government apparatus – more precisely, the ability of presidents and prime ministers, as well
as finance ministers, to control and coordinate other departments and the public sector at large
(Dahlstro
̈m, Peters, & Pierre, 2011). The starting point is a ‘natural’ tendency of public
organizations such as line ministries to pursue distinct and (necessarily) selective policy
objectives. In other words, the basic problem is that governments are characterized by a
division of labour, which requires some degree of coordination (Wegrich & Štimac, 2014).
This challenge arguably has increased over time in the wake of administrative reforms resulting
in a higher fragmentation of public bureaucracies (Bouckaert, Peters, & Verhoest, 2010).
Hence, questions of organization and political control are not simply about the relationship
between politicians and bureaucrats but also about power relations between the ‘core
executive’ (i.e. those organizations set up to ‘pull the strings’ in government in order to achieve
coherence and solve conflicts) and other governmental bodies. In a broader perspective, issues
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of control over bureaucracy also touch upon the relationship between politicians and other
administrative organizations, in particular executive and regulatory agencies (see below).
The interaction of political executives and policy bureaucrats in policymaking
The third field where the power relation between elected politicians and the policy bureaucracy
plays out is their actual interaction in policymaking. Who really calls the shots when it comes
to setting the agenda, formulating policy lines, and designing individual policies? Weber’s
model of bureaucratic rule has long been interpreted as a normative model that calls for a strict
separation of roles in policymaking, with politicians setting objectives and allocating values
and bureaucrats merely implementing orders by filling in the details (Aberbach et al., 1981).
And while this myth prevails as a normative model also within the bureaucracy, it has been
repeatedly debunked by empirical research since the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Mayntz and Scharpf’s (1975) study was among the first that discredited the myth of a
strong hierarchical relationship between political executives and policy bureaucrats. Their in-
depth empirical studies of policymaking in the German federal bureaucracy revealed two key
findings. One is the central role of the smallest organizational units in the German ministries –
the Referate (sections) – in the policy formulation process. Not only was policy knowledge
concentrated in these units, but they also maintained relations with external stakeholders such
as interest organizations. Much of the policy knowledge was generated through this interaction.
Mayntz and Scharpf (1975) showed that these units were critical not only in formulating first
drafts of policies but also in initiating policies. The second key finding was that the relationship
between the lower levels and the political leadership was characterized by a (silent) dialogue.
In this dialogue model, policy bureaucrats take into account signals from the higher echelons
in their rather independent policy work, while the political level values the subject matter-
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related expertise of policy bureaucrats. While the dialogue model is suggestive of a relatively
harmonious relationship between the two antipodes, Mayntz and Scharpf (1975) pointed out
the limited capacities of the political level to actually lead the policymaking process, given
their limited resources for policy analysis and development work.
And while this study was limited to Germany, and is by now four decades old, its core
empirical findings have displayed remarkable longevity. In their comparative study, Aberbach
et al. (1981) confirmed that bureaucrats are indeed involved in all dimensions of policymaking.
The integration of political aspects of policymaking by civil servants, such as anticipating
potential opposition and support for policy alternatives, has subsequently been labelled
‘functional politicization’, denoting distinct role perceptions as well as decision-making
behaviours (Derlien, 1996; Hustedt & Salomonsen, 2014). Peters (1988) has outlined five
different ideal-type models of politics–administration interaction that mainly point to cross-
national variation in relational distance between politicians and bureaucrats – with the ‘village
life’ model being at one end and the ‘adversarial model’ at the other. Peters builds his typology
on seminal studies of individual countries, such as Heclo and Wildavsky’s (1974) work on the
civil service of the United Kingdom that indeed stresses the informal character of the country’s
club-like caste of higher civil servants. Heclo’s (1977) study highlights the contrasting model
of the US, which he characterizes as a ‘government of strangers’ given the high fluctuation of
public officials in the US spoils system.
But despite these cross-national differences, the hybridization of roles, the significance
of policy bureaucrats in policy development, and the limited role of hierarchy in politics–
administration interaction within a policymaking context were confirmed by the many studies
published in the 1970s and 1980s. More recent follow-up studies, however, indicate shifting
tectonics in this relationship. For example, in a review of the key claims of Mayntz and Scharpf
(1975), Goetz (2007) points to politicization, outsourcing of policy advice, and
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Europeanization as key trends undermining the central role of policy bureaucrats in Germany.
For other countries, the shifts have been characterized as more disruptive, such as ministers
and bureaucrats ‘growing apart’ ('t Hart & Wille, 2006) or the ‘breaking of the bargain’ (Savoie,
2003). The rise of New Public Management (NPM) since the 1980s can be considered a driver
and manifestation of such disruption. With tailwind from a general rise in ‘bureaucracy
bashing’, politicians demand more managerial skills and ‘delivery competencies’ (Hood &
Lodge, 2006) as well as more direct accountability of bureaucrats for results – and in particular
failure. The trend of politicization, discussed above, is linked to the increasingly widespread
perception of growing estrangement between political executives and policy bureaucrats, with
the former trying to strengthen loyalty and political thinking within the bureaucracy and the
latter perceiving a decline in their influence in policymaking.
However, there remains a lack of systematic and cross-national comparative research
that would allow generalizing such claims of more strained relations or the sidelining of
bureaucrats in policymaking. At the same time, there is sufficient empirical ground to suggest
that the rapidly changing context of policymaking – mediatization, austerity, political
polarization – has taken its toll, challenging if not disrupting the ‘dialogue model’ of politics-
bureaucracy interactions in policymaking. We should simply be aware of a potentially wide
range of cross-national variation with regard to the strength and impact of these disruptive
trends.
Theoretical perspectives on political executives and bureaucrats
Empirical research on the three main questions discussed above has been shaped by a variety
of theoretical approaches. Weber’s model of bureaucratic rule is an enduring reference point,
mainly as a yardstick for assessing the empirical reality of politics–bureaucracy relations in
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contrast to normative ideals. Weber’s thinking has also been highly influential in studying how
different national systems deal with the challenges of controlling bureaucracy (Page, 1992).
But research on the politics-bureaucracy relationship has also been influenced by the dominant
general theoretical frameworks of political science, namely the rational choice (or political
economy) approach and the family of institutional approaches. The political economy
perspective is particularly significant, not only because of its power to explain behaviour but
also due to its practical relevance in shaping (or justifying) views of the politics–bureaucracy
relationship as primarily a problem of controlling a bureaucracy perpetually working against
the interests of political executives (Pierre & Peters, 2017).
Niskanen’s (1971) model of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat was the first influential
rational choice approach dedicated to the behaviour of bureaucrats. Wilson (1989) and
Dunleavy (1991) later debunked its simple claim that bureaucrats seek expanding budgets
because this comes with opportunities for increasing salary and power. Wilson (1989) argued
that an increase in budget might undermine the coherence of an agency’s mission; taking on
tasks that do not fit into its existing portfolio might also undermine the reputation of an agency
or create divided constituencies. Dunleavy (1991) remained within the bounds of the logic of
rational choice but argued that bureaucratic leaders are more interested in maximizing
interesting policy work and engagement with political leaders, rather than cumbersome
administrative work accompanied by the risk of conflict and blame. The creation of a number
of executive agencies that relieved UK central government departments from implementation
tasks was used as an example to develop that theory and was later on tested empirically (James,
2003).
Despite these challenges, the rational choice perspective remained the central
parsimonious theoretical framework for the analysis of politics–-bureaucracy relations. In
particular the principal–agent framework (see Bendor, Glazer, & Hammond, 2001 for a review)
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took centre stage in theoretical debates. Not so different from Weber’s take, it highlighted the
information asymmetry between political principals and bureaucratic agents – and assumed
that bureaucrats would exploit this asymmetry for private gain by way of shirking and drifting.
The principal–agent model became the reference point and justification for performance
contracts and incentive systems that aimed at minimizing risks of bureaucratic shirking and
agency drift and provided academic verification of the NPM revolution sweeping across
governments in the OECD world and beyond (Boston, Martin, Pallot, & Walsh, 1996). For
political executives, NPM promised a solution to the problem of the ‘shirking bureaucrat’
(Pierre & Peters, 2017), also in light of doubts about the loyalty of bureaucrats having already
served for previous governments.
It took two decades of NPM reform practices with a wide range of unintended effects –
including pervasive gaming of target regimes and the crowding out of intrinsic motivation –
before challengers to the principal–agent perspective received more voice in the debate and
competing approaches emerged. The Public Service Bargain (PSB) theory of Hood and Lodge
(2006) is one exhibit of this new line of theorizing. The PSB perspective conceives the
relationship between political executives and policy bureaucrats as a bargain in which both
parties gain something but also must forfeit something. Loyalty, reward, and competencies are
the three main dimensions of this bargain, and Hood and Lodge (2006) have demonstrated that
the managerial agency bargain that is part of the NPM reform toolkit is but one of many
different bargains that have developed since departing from the classic public service bargain.
This classic bargain, originally formulated by Bernard Schaffer, consists of politicians giving
up the right to hire and fire bureaucrats at will while gaining a certain set of competencies and
loyalty to the government of the day; bureaucrats, in return, give up their right to publicly
criticize the government but gain accepted positions in the policymaking system and a series
of rewards, mostly importantly job security and predictable career trajectories. Hood and Lodge
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(2006) draw on various country contexts (the UK and Germany in particular) to show how this
classic bargain varied between countries early on (with a more ‘agency’ type in the UK and a
more independent ‘trustee’ bargain in Germany) and how administrative reforms and
contextual changes changed the bargains over time. The PSB perspective allows us to explore
how changes in one dimension can have (unintended) downstream effects on other dimensions.
For example, attempts to foster additional ‘delivery’ skills with a more managerial (‘turkey
race’) reward structure can – and did – undermine bureaucrats’ loyalty to, and support for,
political executives in critical situations.
The PSB perspective is an important departure from the unidirectional perspective of
the principal–agent framework, which is limited to exploring ways to control the runaway agent
– an assumption that has been challenged on both empirical and theoretical grounds (see Pierre
& Peters, 2017 for a summary). It stresses the exchange relation between the two parties and
the significance of informal expectations and understandings, with some form of capricious
equilibrium as an underlying criterion for ‘good’ relations between politicians and bureaucrats
(although Hood and Lodge would not state it so bluntly). Further scholarship of the current
decade has added to the challenges of the principal–agent perspective by pointing to the often-
problematic behaviour of the political principal. In these accounts, the key problem is not the
bureaucrat but rather the cheating, shirking, and drifting principal who does not hold their end
of the bargain, undermining policy effectiveness, bureaucratic professionalism, and democratic
accountability (Miller & Whitford, 2016; Schillemans & Busuioc, 2015) .
Further tailwind for this more critical take on the role of politicians in relation to
bureaucrats arrived with the recent wave of research following the ‘behavioural’ turn in
economics and beyond. Mainly interested in the prevalence of biases among actor groups,
including but not limited to politicians and bureaucrats, experimental designs have explored
the prevalence of confirmation bias in particular (i.e. the tendency to pay greater attention to
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information supporting existing causal understandings and worldviews). These studies reveal
that politicians indeed display strong confirmation bias when confronted with new information
(such as information regarding school performance) – and that providing additional evidence
that challenges prior attitudes actually results in stronger confirmation biases and motivated
reasoning (Baekgaard, Christensen, Dahlmann, Mathiasen, & Petersen, 2017).
These studies, and the behavioural theorizing on which they are based, have yet to
contribute to the exploration of the politics–bureaucracy relationship – mainly because they
focus on individual behaviour and have trouble conceptualizing interaction between actors and
the effects of organizational context on individual biases. However, these approaches have the
potential to uncover dynamics in politico–administrative relations that could be integrated into,
or combined with, other approaches that seek to develop the classic principal–agent
perspective. New challenges of political polarization, hyper-politicization, and the
weaponization of public administration for political means call for just such an integration of
perspectives.
Politicians and bureaucrats in executive government: contemporary research
perspectives
Comparative perspectives on political control and bureaucratic power
The comparative study of political executives and policy bureaucracies is certainly one of the
most fruitful areas of research within the literature discussed in this chapter. The most
influential comparative study to date was published in the early 1980s and focused on the
interaction of (executive and legislative) politicians and policy bureaucrats (Aberbach et al.,
1981). This study showed significant cross-country differences in the respective roles and
interactions of politicians and bureaucrats. Since then, most comparative analyses have been
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edited volumes with country chapters often employing somewhat different theoretical and
empirical approaches, rather than being the result of tightly integrated comparative projects
(see for example Dahlström et al., 2011; Page & Wright, 1999; Peters & Pierre, 2004).
Yet despite being more comparable than comparative in nature, those studies have
advanced the research frontier and have paved the way for further research. To engage in
meaningful comparative research on a larger scale requires concept development based on
thick contextual analysis, in particular that which highlights different institutional
arrangements meant to address the delegation problem faced by political executives. Those
arrangements can be thought of as a continuum, with some countries characterized by
politically neutral merit bureaucracies without formal politicization of top official positions
(for example, Denmark, the Netherlands, the UK), others having politicized positions at the
commanding heights of policy bureaucracies (France, Germany, Sweden, the US), and still
others applying political criteria for appointments also below the uppermost level of policy
bureaucracies (Austria, Belgium, Greece, Spain) (Derlien, 1996; Meyer-Sahling, 2008; Page
& Wright, 1999).
More recently, contemporary scholars have engage in comparative studies covering
smaller sets of countries and addressing topics such as the functions and interactions of
politicians, special advisers, and career officials (Christiansen, Niklasson, & Öhberg, 2016);
interactions between politicians and bureaucrats in rule-making (Page, 2012); politicization of
the civil service (Meyer-Sahling & Veen, 2012); and the organization of executive bureaucracy
(Fleischer, 2009). Nonetheless,, several noteworthy comparative studies cover more than a
handful of countries, including a study on ‘party patronage’ (Kopecký, Mair, & Spirova, 2012;
Kopecký et al., 2016), based on face-to-face expert interviews. This research considers not only
the prevalence of politicization of (different parts of) the state apparatus but also the kinds of
qualifications sought by politicians for political appointees, as well as politicians’ motives for
17
politicization. A key finding is that politicians’ motives for politicization primarily concern the
exercise of political control, although often in combination with the desire to reward loyal
followers.
Another approach has been to collect survey data among senior officials in order to
assess cross-country variation in politicized appointments. Bach et al. (2018) show that patterns
of politicization in Europe fit squarely with established administrative traditions, such as low
levels of politicization in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries and high levels of
politicization in Napoleonic countries, but they also show how countries considered part of the
same administrative tradition vary substantially in terms of politicized appointments, such as
the post-communist countries (Meyer-Sahling & Veen, 2012). A third approach is to gauge
politicization by mapping the party political backgrounds of top officials. Although there are
to date no comparative studies of top officials in policy bureaucracies that use this approach,
several single-country studies provide useful starting points for international comparisons
(Bach & Veit, 2018; Christensen et al., 2014; Ennser-Jedenastik, 2016a; Meyer-Sahling, 2008).
Leadership capacity and political control: the growth, function, and effects of ministerial
advisers
The increasing use of ministerial advisers who enter and leave their positions together with
their political superiors is another key topic in contemporary research on politico-
administrative relations (Hustedt, Kolltveit, & Salomonsen, 2017; Shaw & Eichbaum, 2015).
This body of scholarship focuses on the expansion, roles, and effects of ministerial advisers
(Askim, Karlsen, & Kolltveit, 2017; Christiansen et al., 2016; Eichbaum & Shaw, 2008;
Hustedt & Salomonsen, 2017; Yong & Hazell, 2014). The main reasons for the growth in
ministerial advisers (also referred to as ‘special’ or ‘political’ advisers) include the aim to
18
increase the political leadership’s capacity to control the policy bureaucracy, the emergence of
more complex policy problems (see also the final section on ‘stress factors’), and permanent
coverage by the news media on political executives. All these developments create the need
for political executives to surround themselves with ‘personal loyalists’ (Hood & Lodge, 2006),
who help politicians navigate rougher political waters.
The literature suggests that the number of special advisers has in particular grown in
systems with a politically neutral, meritocratic civil service (Dahlström et al., 2011). The
potential threat these special advisers pose to civil service neutrality and impartiality are a
cross-cutting theme in this body of scholarship (Shaw & Eichbaum, 2015). Many studies on
special advisers aim to gain a better understanding of the nature of the beast, including the
growth patterns (Dahlstro
̈m, 2009), career backgrounds (Yong & Hazell, 2014), and functions
and role understandings of special advisers (Askim et al., 2017). The last body of research has
produced several typologies of ministerial advisers’ functional roles (see Hustedt et al., 2017
for an overview). For instance, Askim et al. (2017) find that ministerial advisers in Norway
serve as ‘stand ins’ for their minister, media advisers (also known as ‘spin doctors’), and
political coordinators. In other contexts, ministerial advisers also perform genuine policy
advisory functions or oversee policy implementation.
Moving from the description of backgrounds and roles, this body of research has
increasingly focused on investigating ministerial advisers in the broader context of executive
politics and their impacts on intra-executive relations between career bureaucrats, political
executives, and special advisers. A key question is whether special advisers insulate policy
bureaucrats from political executives or otherwise control the flow of information from policy
bureaucrats to political executives. Empirical evidence regarding these implications is mixed.
To illustrate, whereas Eichbaum and Shaw (2008) suggest that such ‘administrative
politicization’ is not practiced on a routine basis in New Zealand, comparative research on
19
Denmark and Sweden by Öhberg, Munk Christiansen, and Niklasson (2017) reveals that a
higher number of special advisers decreases policy bureaucrats’ access to political executives.
Other evidence has indicated that in contexts with few special advisers and a meritocratic career
civil service, the latter perform genuinely political functions that would otherwise be performed
by ministerial advisers (Christiansen et al., 2016). However, this functional politicization
seems to come at the price of a lower proportion of genuine policymaking functions performed
by policy bureaucrats. In that sense, ministerial advisers may contribute to a more clear-cut
separation of political and administrative functions, rather than politicizing policy
bureaucracies.
Another theme related to ministerial advisers addresses their role in executive
coordination, meaning whether special advisers effectively ‘deliver’ increased levels of
political control over permanent bureaucrats. Here, the research indicates that special advisers
may indeed increase political control over policy coordination, although their authority is
shaped by institutional context, such as systems with high degrees of prime ministerial
authority (and hence powerful special advisers at the centre of government) as opposed to
systems with strong line ministers (Hustedt & Salomonsen, 2017). Taken together, recent
scholarship on the interactions between and functions of special advisers and policy
bureaucrats not only highlights implications of political leadership capacity on political control
over the bureaucracy but also sheds new light on the roles and functions of career officials and
their responsiveness to political preferences.
Governing executive and regulatory agencies
Although this chapter primarily focuses on political executives and policy bureaucracies, any
contemporary analysis of the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats in executive
20
government would remain incomplete without considering executive and regulatory agencies,
which have become an integral component of governments around the globe (Levi-Faur &
Jordana, 2004; Verhoest, van Thiel, Bouckaert, & Lægreid, 2012). The delivery of public
services and the exercise of regulatory functions by agencies with an appointed leadership have
become cornerstones of public sectors worldwide. From the perspective of political executives,
agencies pose a potential problem of political control over policy implementation. Agencies
perform important societal functions, which may prompt ministers to politicize agency heads.
Yet politicians may also consider agencies as job machines providing employment
opportunities for loyal supporters. Moreover, agencies may also provide advantages to
politicians by serving as lightning rods for problems of policy implementation.
The empirical literature indicates generally lower levels of politicization for
appointments in agencies (and other arm’s-length bodies) compared to those in ministerial
departments (Bach et al., 2018; Kopecký et al., 2016). At the same time and in particular in
developing contexts, the creation of agencies has been linked to the idea of ‘islands of
excellence’ in otherwise highly politicized bureaucracies, deliberately creating organizations
protected from politicians’ (ab)use of appointment powers (Roberts, 2010). This notion of
credible commitment is also at the core of the discussion about regulatory agencies. Assuming
time-inconsistent preferences among politicians, regulators are created as formally
independent, protected from political interference by various tools of institutional design (Levi-
Faur & Jordana, 2004). Again, the premise is based on de-politicization, creating effective
government by delegating discretion to professional civil servants. However, this type of
delegation does not mean that politicians completely abstain from exercising political control.
They may seek to compensate for their lack of influence over substantial agency decisions by
appointing partisan loyalists to leadership positions. Indeed research reveals that higher levels
21
of formal agency independence are positively associated with the level of party politicization
(Ennser-Jedenastik, 2016b).
Finally, whereas scholars of politicization in Europe have shown that patterns of
(de)selection of top officials are not the same for all ministries or agencies (Kopecký et al.,
2016), they are only gradually beginning to understand the reasons behind the differential
politicization of the government apparatus (Bach et al., 2018; Ennser-Jedenastik, 2016b). To
date, only a handful of studies have examined the politicization of agency heads in Europe,
providing mixed results (Dahlström & Holmgren, 2017; Dahlstro
̈m & Niklasson, 2013;
Ennser-Jedenastik, 2016b; Petrovsky, James, Moseley, & Boyne, 2017) – a marked difference
from the US, where scholars have extensively studied political appointments across the entire
administration. Importantly, this literature shows how differences among organizations’
political relevance and complexity affect patterns of (de)selection of top officials (Hollibaugh
et al., 2014; Lewis, 2008; Lewis & Waterman, 2013). As of now, the European literature has
largely ignored within-country variation of politicized appointments (with few exceptions, see
Kopecký et al., 2016).
A research agenda for the study of political executives and policy bureaucracies
The three fundamental research topics discussed in the second section of this chapter are bound
to feature prominently in future research on the relationship between political executives and
policy bureaucrats. What has changed since the first wave of research on these topics is,
however, the social, political, technological, and economic context in which the supposedly
natural tensions between politicians and bureaucrats play out. These changes call for a
development, if not reconsideration (or overhaul), not only of the empirical focus of research
22
and the respective theoretical lenses but also of the normative orientation markers in order to
make sense of shifting patterns and responses to new challenges.
The new stress factors in executive politics
How the politics–bureaucracy nexus responds to new stress factors exerting pressure on both
parties has been a key research topic, as discussed above. The rise of ‘bureaucracy bashing’
and belief in the superiority of private sector management techniques and market incentives
have challenged the classic public service bargain (though in more diverse ways than the NPM
folk story would have it). But while these developments are very much on the radar of public
administration research, new stressors and pressure points call for a further development of this
line of research. The rise of wicked and unruly problems – such as climate change, migration,
terrorism, and digitization – is combined with a changing media landscape and in particular the
rise of social media, which not only place politicians and also increasingly public agencies
under constant scrutiny but also fuel political polarization and ‘truth decay’ (Kavanagh & Rich,
2018).
These trends translate to politico–administration relations by further distancing the two
groups: under tighter media scrutiny and more rapid communication cycles, and increasing risk
of malicious (‘böswillig’) critique, the significance of purely political thinking and strategic
communication increases – something that the traditional policy bureaucrat might not be
willing or able to deliver. On the one hand, this development calls for a further exploration of
the dynamics of politicization. In addition to studying personnel decisions and their effects (see
below), such a research agenda should focus on (changes in) role understandings and
interaction patterns between political executives, special advisers, and policy bureaucrats.
23
On the other hand, a key question is how this development sits with the increasing
technical and analytical demands placed on policy bureaucrats. The rise of complex policy
challenges calls for a major update of the competency profile of policy bureaucrats and in
particular the attraction of nerd-like competencies (Lodge & Wegrich, 2012). Ironically,
political polarization and truth decay come together in stronger calls for more technocracy and
analytical skills – be they in the form of ‘experimental policymaking’ or impact assessment
procedures. One can argue both that these are counter-trends to politicization and that there is
an overlap between (1) technocracy and (2) anti-politics pursued by populist parties and the
public mood. In other words, the policy bureaucracy is pushed to fulfil contradictory functions:
being more politically responsive and savvy in supporting tactical communication while still
keeping up with the increasing demand for state-of-the-art analytical policy work (Veit,
Hustedt, & Bach, 2017). While the PSB perspective is well placed to capture the
aforementioned changing patterns in terms of mutual expectations for competency, reward, and
loyalty, future studies should reorient towards one of the field’s core topics by investigating
what takes place inside the machine room of government. Such studies could investigate
politico-administrative interactions in policymaking processes with varying degrees of political
contestation or analytical requirements.
Politicization: appointments, replacements, effects
Although an established field of research, many puzzles in the study of the politicization of
senior-level appointments remain unsolved. A key argument in the contemporary literature is
that the delicate balance between safeguarding the bureaucracy’s professional autonomy and
ensuring its responsiveness to elected politicians’ preferences has tipped towards the latter as
a result of increasing levels of political influence on the (de)selection of top officials (Aucoin,
24
2012; Dahlstro
̈m et al., 2011; Peters & Pierre, 2004). Yet this claim of an increase in civil
service politicization rests on shaky empirical ground. Most politicization research is primarily
cross-sectional or retrospective in nature, rather than truly longitudinal. Dahlstro
̈m (2009) uses
country experts’ estimates of the number of political appointees over time, whereas others rely
on survey data, expert interviews, or mixed methods to track politicization dynamics (Bach et
al., 2018; Hustedt & Salomonsen, 2014; Kopecký et al., 2016). These studies face obvious
methodological limitations in grasping long-term trends, and we clearly need better data – for
instance, based on document or biographical analysis – to track changes and compare
developments over time.
More substantially, we know little about political executives’ actual motivations and
criteria for (de)selecting top officials. There is some evidence regarding control versus reward
as motivations (Kopecký et al., 2016), but analyses of top officials’ partisan loyalty or of
political change as a driver of bureaucratic turnover represent cases of observational
equivalence – compatible with both reward and control types of motivations (Dahlström &
Holmgren, 2017). Moreover, we know little about substantial criteria for appointing and
replacing top officials beyond measures of partisan loyalty, including politicized contexts but
also in countries with meritocratic personnel systems in which politicians have more limited
influence over personnel decisions. The literature on the loyalty–competence nexus in political
appointments in the US could potentially serve as a way forward for research outside the US
context (Hollibaugh et al., 2014; Lewis & Waterman, 2013; Ouyang et al., 2017).
Another important future challenge is that almost all studies of politicization
concentrate on incumbent office holders, which substantially limits the possibility for drawing
inferences on politicians’ reasons for selecting top officials in the first place. For instance,
partisan loyalty might also be widespread among senior officials below the level of top
officials; yet we simply do not know whether this characteristic makes a difference for
25
individual career success. Bach and Veit (2018) address these problems and demonstrate the
analytical purchase of studying the promotion of top officials in Germany from among a pool
of candidates based on multiple selection criteria. A comparison of potential and actual office
holders is considered the ideal research design for studying politicians’ selection criteria
(Ouyang et al., 2017). However, in contrast to research on the selection of ministers from
among members of parliament (Bäck, Debus, & Müller, 2016), this approach has until recently
not been used in politicization research.
Finally, the politicization of civil service appointments raises crucial questions about
the desirability and effects of politicization. There is growing evidence that politicization has
detrimental effects on government performance and increases risks of corruption (Dahlström
& Lapuente, 2017; Lewis, 2008). Again, the US literature offers the most comprehensive
analyses, indicating lower levels of administrative performance for public agencies managed
by political appointees as opposed to career officials (Lewis, 2008). Moreover, there is
empirical evidence about the negative effects of politicization of the public sector on various
aspects of good government (Dahlström & Lapuente, 2017). However, we still know little
about the effects of politicization of policy bureaucracies (which may not necessarily coincide
with the politicization of the public sector in general) on some measure of ‘government
performance’.
Conclusion
The starting point of this chapter was the observation that political executives inevitably face
problems of delegation vis-à-vis policy bureaucracies. As a consequence, the study of the
relationship between political executives and policy bureaucrats is concerned with the problem
of ensuring political control over the bureaucracy, and the assessment of bureaucrats’ influence
26
on policymaking. Whereas the principal–agent framework and other political economy
approaches have generated important insights into politico-administrative relations, there is
increasing evidence that several of those theories’ core assumptions are at best empirically
questionable (Pierre & Peters, 2017) – and that one of the greatest theoretical challenges is to
understand the conditions under which bureaucratic autonomy, rather than political control,
should be a guiding principle for organizational design (Dahlström & Lapuente, 2017; Miller
& Whitford, 2016).
In order to answer questions such as how much bureaucratic autonomy is required for
good governance, we need a sound knowledge base about the antecedents and effects of
politico-administrative relations in executive politics. Future research on the relationship
between political executives and policy bureaucrats should not only develop causal models
explaining the dynamics of this relationship in increasingly turbulent times; it should also
contribute with normative theories about appropriate degrees of bureaucratic autonomy, on the
one hand, and (the boundaries of) legitimate political control, on the other hand. The implicit
normative underpinnings of principal–agent approaches have too long shaped our debates
about what happens and what should happen in the relationship between politicians and
bureaucrats.
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