The Clientelist Top Civil Servant? Patterns and Practices in Western Europe

This paper analyses the relevance of clientelism at the top echelons of central governments. It argues that the relations between cabinet members and top officials show a varying degree of clientelism, depending on the institutional context, organisational features of the portfolio, temporal dynamics, and individual characteristics of both actors. To analyse the patterns and practices of clientelist relations and their effects on public policy, this paper compares the tenure of bureaucratic elites in four Western European countries exemplifying different administrative traditions that shape the formal rules of selection and de-selection of senior civil servants, namely Germany (Rechtsstaat), Spain (Napoleonic), Norway (Scandinavian), and the UK (Anglo-American). In a first step, the paper examines the formal opportunities for clientelist interactions between cabinet ministers and their top officials, discussing the repercussions between patronage and politicisation in civil service systems according to the formal rules for selection and de-selection and its consequences on bureaucratic turnover and the tenure of top officials. In a second step, the paper performs statistical analyses with a novel dataset containing the career trajectories and additional information on all senior bureaucrats in all four countries in office between 1990 and 2013. The empirical analysis shows the different relevance of individual ministers for the tenure of top officials, signifying the varying patterns and practices of clientelism. More importantly, it reveals the interactions of institutional, organisational, and individual explanatory variables for bureaucratic tenure and thus offers a more broader explanatory view on clientelism in executives.