The Policy-Based Politics of Structural Choice. How Bureaucratic Reorganizations Meet Policy Issues' Attention in the Executive Agenda

This paper proposes to develop both theoretical and empirical perspectives in order to bridge policy agendas and reorganizations literature. While scholars on policy agendas have paid much attention on various institutional sites of the politics of attention like governmental and legislative agendas, they have surprisingly neglected the bureaucracy and the reshaping of administrative structures as a signal of the attention political executives devote to policy issues. Similarly, scholars in reorganizations did not sufficiently explore the policy dimension in the politics of structural choices. This paper proposes to theorize organizational changes as policy commitments by distinguishing two functions of administration reshaping: expressive or substantive policy commitment. We will then test and discuss the validity of these two links between attention and structures on two ministries (Economics and Interior) in France by using data on the executive agenda from the French database within the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) and data from the novel dataset on the Structure and Organization of Government (SOG-PRO).