Politicians aim to be responsive to citizens’ needs and pay changing attention to a vast number of policy problems, either because they have to deal with them when they emerge in society and on the agenda or because they have been emphasized during electoral campaigns. To this aim, they need expert advice and law proposals on those topics they want to be responsive to and organizational changes in bureaucracies often express and reflect government priorities and electoral promises. More specifically, changing the name of a ministry or a ministerial department is a signal of the government’s attention to some specific issues, towards the voters or specific clienteles and interest groups or the bureaucrats themselves. Name changes of ministerial bureaucracies (creation, transformation or suppression) “signal” the attention paid to a policy issue and the fact that a unit – by its name – has the core goal of producing policies on this topic. New names may signal new priorities of an incoming government. Names that drop out may be from predecessors that are terminated by the incumbent. Name changes may also be a symbolic action by which politicians can create the appearance that they respond to citizens’ need or fulfill their promises without actually changing more than the name. Based on an original dataset collecting structural changes in ministerial bureaucracies in four European countries (France, Germany, Netherlands and United Kingdom), this paper explores the patterns of name changes compared to other structural interventions on bureaucracies but also estimates the ‘symbolic’ dimension of this political strategy by comparing the importance of names changes which are not associated to in-depth restructuring with name changes linked to such transformative effects on structures.
