Negotiation Resources of the Bureaucracy

Negotiation Resources of the Bureaucracy In processes of policy-making, the ministerial bureaucracy typically engages in coordination and negotiation processes before or even instead of politicians. Yet, bureaucratic coordination processes are often conducted ‘behind closed doors’ and with without public records or documentation. Hence there is little knowledge about which actors are influential during the process and what determines their influence, which negotiation resources they bring into the process. The questions arise: Which ministerial bureaucrats are most influential during the negotiation process? What determines the negotiation power of bureaucrats? Political science literature has brought forward a number of negotiation resources for politicians, amongst them voting power, economic size, institutional power but also skill, experience and party politics (e.g. Bailer, 2010). Against this background, this paper investigates if the same negotiation resources are used by the bureaucratic actors and how important they are in bureaucratic negotiation processes. If bureaucrats used the same negotiation resources than politicians, this would be a further indicator of a strong politicization of the ministerial bureaucracy (Mayntz & Derlien, 1989; Peters & Pierre, 2004). This question is analysed with the case of multilevel and multisectoral coordination during the preparation of the German Bundesrat where the ministerial bureaucracy plays a prominent role (Schrenk, 2010; Sturm & Müller, 2013). Making use of a newly collected dataset on the coordination network among ministerial bureaucrats from all sub-states and policy sectors in the German Bundesrat, it becomes possible to measure the importance and influence of actors using centrality measures of social network analysis (Boje & Whetten, 1981; Brandes, 2016). Further distinguishing between several measures and their respective interpretation offers a more nuanced picture on influence. Using regression analysis with clustered standard errors allows investigating which negotiation resources determine which kind of influence. Note to the section chairs: I think that the proposed paper would fit into the panel on bureaucratic reputation, since the concept of centrality in the coordination process is also related to reputation and I would especially be interested in including this factor into my analysis. But if you think another panel fits better, that is fine by me.