Politics-Administration Relationships through the Temporal Looking-Glass

Abstract

Since public bureaucracies are deeply involved in policy formulation, development and implementation, the worlds of politicians and of politics are very closely intertwined with the world of bureaucrats. A vast theoretical, conceptual and empirical literature dating back to at least the 1940s (e.g., Key 1942; Waldo 1952, 1965; Putnam 1973; Moe 1985; Huber 2000; Demir and Nyhan 2008) has been devoted to the resulting politics-administration relationships in an attempt better to understand “the complex and subtle mechanisms that link political and bureaucratic institutions” (Scholz 1986, p.1265). Somewhat surprisingly, issues of time, temporality and temporal dynamics – which are omnipresent in any form of organizational life – have received much more limited attention in this literature thus far. More recently, however, accounting for ‘time’ and ‘what happens over time’ has become a significant topic of academic research in public administration and governance (e.g., Pollitt, 2008; Goetz, 2009, 2014; Murdoch et al., 2021). This panel contributes to this development by addressing politics-administration relationships through a distinctly temporal looking-glass. It is particularly interested in temporal dynamics related to changes within bureaucrats’ broader organizational environment – such as political turnover events or the increasing medialization and personalization of politics – as well as public employees’ potential coping strategies in response to such temporal events – such as strategic information processing and sensemaking processes or individual-level adjustments in terms of political responsiveness and/or ideological compatibility. By studying these topics, the panel aims further to develop our understanding of the role of temporal dynamics in public management and governance. The panel is linked to two research projects that analyze longitudinal aspects of bureaucracies (Norwegian Research Council project “ADM-IN-TIME: Longitudinal perspectives on local, central, and supranational public bureaucracies”) and the temporal characteristics of network governance (HorizonEurope “DemoTrans” project).

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