Measuring Political-Administrative Co-Ordination in Core Executives

Over the past decades, the importance of coordination for policy effectiveness – especially in fragmented executives – has come to be widely acknowledged. This is reflected in the growth of studies on both administrative and political coordination. Yet, unless we accept the politics-administration dichotomy, the policy process is more complex and continuously involves politicians and civil servants. The presence of both sets of actors means that political-administrative coordination – coordination involving both politicians and civil servants – is at least as important for policy outcomes as coordination within either set of actors. In this paper, we seek to contribute to a better understanding of political-administrative coordination by defining and operationalising the concept. Indicators include, for instance, ministries with coordinating tasks and cross-sectoral coordination committees at the cabinet and ministerial level. We also present our first descriptive analyses of coordination data collected from both established and developing economies. Finally, we present avenues for further research, including the analysis of cross-country variation.