Organising Expertise in the 'Iron Cage': Bureaucratic Specialisation and the Quality of Government in Western Europe

This paper aims to study how governments organise expertise internally and with what effects on government policy-making and the quality of government. We claim that the structural inertia and change of government organisations address crucial demarcations and boundaries of knowledge and expertise – but also hierarchies, formal competencies and authority. As a consequence, this functional specialisation shapes government policy-making. Following organisation theory and its key argument that organisations strive for legitimacy, we assume a curvilinear relationship between the frequency and scope of changes of bureaucratic units and their policy output: If bureaucratic units have experienced recent changes, they are comparatively stronger requested to 'deliver', in a sense the bureaucratic version of the 'honeymoon period' well-known from the comparative politics literature. If bureaucratic units benefit from a long period of structural inertia, they can build and re-invest in growing expertise and are comparatively better equipped to 'deliver'. We test this argument on a dataset covering the formal structural changes in German federal ministries and their policy output in gestalt of statutory instruments that are enacted without parliamentary approval between 1980 and 2013. We employ event history models to show how the patterns of bureaucratic specialisation across cabinets, portfolios, and over time influence executive policy-making. Further, we control for alternative organisational determinants of their parent ministry likely to influence their policy output or 'executive performance', including portfolio salience, size, and ministerial and bureaucratic turnover. Our empirical analysis shows that the variation of the functional specialisation of ministerial bureaucracies influences the policy output of ministerial units. In the conclusion, we discuss the applicability of these findings to other parliamentary systems in Western Europe and our contribution to the debate over the relevance of expertise for the quality of governments.