Bargains to the left, bargains to the right: Structuring interactions between ministers, advisers and officials in the executive triangle.

The advent of the executive triangle has fundamentally altered the ebb and flow of interactions between ministers, their political (or ministerial) advisers and civil servants. Although there are indications of an emerging comparative literature regarding ministerial advisers’ contribution to these dynamics, much of the scholarship remains rooted in single country cases. In part, that may reflect a relative dearth of theoretical means of stretching across geographical contexts. In this paper we offer one such means. We take as our point of departure Hood and Lodge’s notion of the public service bargain (PSB), which offers a template for comparative studies of interactions between executive (elected and appointed) actors structured around the dimensions of competence, reward and loyalty and responsibility. While the lion’s share of the PSB literature attends to relations between ministers and civil servants, the contours of what has been called the political adviser bargain (PAB) – a subset of the classical PSB – have begun to emerge. However, two issues remain: (a) the PAB construct remains substantially under-theorized and (b) its focus on minister/ministerial adviser relations does not yet accommodate interactions between ministerial advisers and their bureaucratic colleagues. In this paper we tackle both issues, with the objective of articulating a theoretical platform that lends itself to comparative empirical application. Keywords: public service bargains, political adviser bargains, ministerial advisers