Policy Advisory Systems and the Politicization of the Permanent Bureaucracy: A Comparison of Denmark and Norway 1970-2019

A wealth of core executive studies and political science research has focused on either policy advisory systems or the politicization of the permanent bureaucracy. Little attention has been paid to how the phenomena interconnect. Our point of departure is that a better understanding of the advisory process – a key core executive phenomenon – necessitates a closer look at the organization of advice, the recruitment to posts serving the political executive, and the practice for replacing senior civil servants. We ask, first, to what extent are merit civil servants involved in the provision of ministers with political advice and assistance while being able to continue in their careers after a change of government? Second, what are the consequences for the civil service if either merit civil servants or political appointees provide ministers with political advice and assistance? To answer these questions we compare Denmark and Norway – fraternal twins as far as the organization and tradition of the core executive is concerned. Still, there is one important difference: Denmark has so far upheld a ministerial organization with ministers as the sole political figure. The responsibility for providing ministers with policy and political advice and assistance therefore rests on merit civil servants alone. Norway has since 1947 had a system where state secretaries share advisory tasks with merit civil servants. This comparative design allows us to improve the understanding of party political politicization as opposed to functional politicization. We expect that the variance in the demands for functional politicization of top civil servants causes variance in the procedures for recruiting secretary generals (SGs), their professional backgrounds, and length of their terms of service. The empirical investigation covers 50 years (1970–2019). A key data source is a unique data set constructed on the basis of biographical analysis of all SGs in the two countries throughout the period studied. We hypothesize that the Danish cabinet engages more actively in the recruitment and replacement of SGs than the Norwegian cabinet does. This hypothesis is strongly supported by the empirical analysis. We also hypothesize that Danish SGs face a stronger risk of removal than Norwegian SGs do, since Danish ministers are so dependent on their SGs that they have to replace them if they cannot establish personal and professional relationship. Therefore, we expect that Danish SGs serve shorter than their Norwegian peers do. This hypothesis finds some support. However, the two countries have in fact seen relatively parallel and strong changes in the average terms of service for SGs: A process started in the 1980s and gained strength in the 1990s resulting in both countries today seeing considerably shorter tenures for SGs than what was the case in the 1970s and early 80s. Also there is no party political bias in this development, indicating that governments are inclined to replace career civil servants with other career civil servants if they don’t get along with the incumbent SGs. These findings offer important answers to CES and political science research and raises new theoretical and empirical challenges.