Already Max Weber (1922) noted the crucial importance of senior civil servants for controlling a professional bureaucracy – consequently bureaucratic elite selection is highly relevant for practitioners but also an intriguing phenomenon for scholars. A growing literature suggests that political parties and ministers as senior party members take an increasing influence on these recruitment processes over time (Kopecký et al. 2012).
This paper focuses on the selection of top officials and conceptualises it as a classic delegation problem, arguing that key features of the delegation context, including the type of party government, cabinet composition, and the openness of the civil service system, shape the behaviour of the principal screening and selecting top officials as her future agents. Empirically, it analyses the recruitment of administrative state secretaries in Germany, drawing upon an original dataset containing the career attainments of all officeholders in federal ministries between 1949 and 2012. In general, these senior civil servants are recruited by individual ministers and strongly regarded as partisan appointees. However, many stay in office after government or minister turnovers. More importantly, the longitudinal analysis shows that a vast majority is recruited from inside the ministerial bureaucracy, emphasising the relevance of bureaucratic experience and sectoral expertise for being appointed as administrative state secretary. Yet, a closer examination of their career attainment shows that a stronger party profile matters for their cresting to the top because it supports a faster career advancement earlier on ('chimney effect', Derlien 1988). As a consequence, the papers' quantitative analyses show that the recruitment of German top officials follows bureaucratic, sectoral and partisan selection criteria, the latter particularly relevant for previous career advancement, and can be explained with the distinct parties in government as well as features of ministers as political masters but also the characteristics of a closed civil service system.
