Financial Bureaucracies of Europe: The Influence of Policy Sector Vs Administrative Tradition on the Attitudes of Finance Officials

The broader goal of the paper is to explore one of the core questions in comparative research on public policy and administration: What is more important in influencing public officials’ attitudes towards policy-making − the distinctive administrative tradition of the country or the specific features of a policy sector? We are particularly interested in the attitudes of the public officials working in the field of finance regarding their policy-making roles: a) To what extent do they see their role to be about developing policy agendas, b) perceive to have policy autonomy, c) perceive the administration (rather than politicians) to be the main initiator of reforms; and d) To what extent do they have technocratic attitudes towards policy-making (i.e. think that policy decisions should be undertaken by unelected officials rather than politicians?). We pose two core research questions: 1) Do the perceptions of finance officials regarding their responsibilities and roles in policy-making differ systematically from the perceptions of non-finance managers? 2) Are finance officials influenced more by their professional group or by the administrative context in which they work? We address these questions using a survey of senior government officials in 19 European countries (7077 respondents). Overall, our results indicate that the national administrative traditions play a stronger role in influencing the policy-making attitudes of officials than their specific sector. Although Christensen and Laegreid (2012) found that finance officials in Norway are a different breed from other civil servants in terms of their attitudes and behaviour, we find little evidence to support the notion that finance officials as a group have different attitudes towards policy-making than officials working in other policy fields. Most of the differences we did find occurred when we compared finance officials across administrative traditions. We see finance officials from the Germanic and CEE traditions differing from finance officials in the Napoleonic and Anglo traditions on the extent to which they understand their role as developing policy agendas, with the former being more likely to see this as an important role for them. We see significant differences between finance officials in the CEE tradition and those in the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon traditions regarding their level of autonomy over policy choice and design, with CEE officials perceiving lower levels. We also see the Germanic finance officials largely perceiving higher levels of autonomy than all other traditions except Anglo-Saxon. We see Anglo-Saxon finance officials being more likely than all but the Scandinavian tradition to perceive the administration rather than the political level as being the main initiator of new policies and reforms. We see statistically significant differences between finance officials in the CEE and Anglo traditions and finance officials in the Scandinavian and Germanic traditions, with the latter being more likely to believe that removing issues and activities from the realm of politics allows for more farsighted policies.