Already Max Weber 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. These officeholders play an important role in government policy-making, transmitting political requirements and bureaucratic expertise while running administrative apparatuses.
In Germany, the selection of top officials is characterised by two partly conflicting dynamics.
On the one hand, the two top-levels in federal ministries are eligible for party-political appointments (although the share of officeholders leaving office after general elections with government turnover is lower than in other countries with similar formal politicisation).
On the other hand, though, the vast majority of German top officials are recruited from inside the ministerial bureaucracy, i.e. they attain their careers in a rather closed labour market.
This paper aims to add a novel perspective to classic public administration research of bureaucratic elite selection. It applies tournament theory in order to explain why certain individuals become top officials – and others don't. It performs analyses with an original dataset containing the career attainments of all permanent secretaries and directors general in German federal ministries from 1949 to 2012. Empirically, it aims to analyse how the features of the German ministerial bureaucracy as closed labour market and the characteristics of the individual competitors for top positions influence the results of bureaucratic elite selection.
It concludes that the institutional and organisational context is as relevant as the homogenous 'tournament prizes' (because German top officials' payment is standardised), and the number and profiles of competitors at the next stage in federal ministries. As a consequence, the strong capabilities of German senior civil servants to keep tabs on bureaucrats are preserved –at the expense of true competition over the best candidates in other regards.
