What are the effects of political recruitments to public administrations? A more than century old debate concerning the boundaries of politics and administration touches on the very premises of democratic governance. On the one hand, governments face the risk of disobedience from strong independent agencies. Without democratic control, policy suggestions going against agency interests might be obstructed. On the other hand, agency efficiency may be impaired when control is bought at the price of competence. Empirical investigations of the effects of political recruitment are however scarce, especially outside the U.S. context. This paper specifies a hypothesis concerning the effects of having political appointees in the administration, and tests it in the area were political-administration relations has been most discussed, namely the budget process. Based on previous research, we assume that administrators have an information advantage over politicians, and generally desire larger budgets for their agencies. However, the information asymmetry should be smaller in agencies were politicians have an ally, and budgets should therefore grow slower in such agencies. In order to test this hypothesis, we have unique data at our disposal. On the independent side we have data on the political affiliation of all Director Generals (DG) and other heads of agencies in Sweden from 1970 to 2010. On the dependent side, we have collected budget information for the agencies during the same time period. Our results indicate that budgets in agencies headed by DG’s with political background indeed grow slower.
