Outsider Career Paths of Administrative State Secretaries. A Sequence Analysis of the Biographies of German Administrative State Secretaries (1990-2013)

Germany’s federal administration distinguishes between parliamentary and administrative state secretaries. While the former are Members of Parliament (MP) and appointed to a ministry, administrative state secretaries are political civil servants who oscillate between the two poles of administrative expertise and political loyalty. Administrative state secretaries belong to the elite of the ministerial bureaucracy (Ministerialbürokratie) and provide a link between the political leadership and the administrative apparatus. Although there has been extensive research on the political attitudes of the German administrative elite in the tradition of Aberbach, and detailed descriptions of their socio-demographic characteristics, there is little systematic research on the career paths of administrative state secretaries. This study identifies and examines career paths of German federal administrative state secretaries. The focus is on the politicization of so-called outsider careers; administrative state secretaries who entered their position after an extended period of employment outside the civil service. Taking into account Germany’s multi-level federalism, we theorize three “stylized” career paths of administrative state secretaries which are linked to different degrees of politicization. In the first step of the empirical analysis, we apply sequence analysis to the biographies of 149 administrative state secretaries from six legislative periods to extract clusters of common career paths. In the second step, we use multivariate analysis to test the politicization of these career clusters. Empirical results confirm the existence of a distinct outsider career cluster, which entails administrative state secretaries that are more politicized than state secretaries falling into the category of a state/municipal or federal career path.