Administrative Reforms, Politicization and the Selection of Heads of State Agencies in Norway

The proposed paper investigates whether and how the selection of heads of state agencies is affected by administrative reform. We are interested in four selection phenomena which, we argue, can be expected to vary across policy sectors and over time and to be affected by the onset or absence of administrative reform. One is whether those selected are generalists or specialists vis-à-vis the tasks agencies perform. The second is whether or not they know the craft of politics. The third is whether those selected to head state agencies are politically allied to a governing party. The fourth concerns the recruitment of agency heads from the private sector. The paper will contribute to the small but growing body of literature on the politics of (de)selecting senior officials in Europe. These studies tend to focus, as we also do here, on changes in the political context and changes in the emphasis on partisan loyalty as drivers of bureaucratic recruitment. These studies rarely consider, however, how administrative reforms affect the (de)selection of senior officials, which is surprising, assuming that managerial reforms can be (mis)used for political purposes. The proposed paper aims to bring this aspect into the empirical study of bureaucratic recruitment, using the case of the heads of state agencies in Norway. The proposed paper will study effects on recruitment from three types of administrative reform: Agency merger, changes in agency autonomy, and the introduction of a bonus scheme for leaders in the public sector. The paper uses a new and unique dataset covering biographical and career information for heads of state agencies in Norway spanning several decades, which is combined with existing data on structural changes in the Norwegian state administration.