Introducing ‘Inter-Ministry Politics’: Analyzing the Role and Crucial Redistributive Impact of Individual Ministries in Policy-Making

Policy-making is a complex business. While we do have a solid understanding of the role of parties, interest groups, and other political actors, we know surprisingly little about the role of individual ministries in the policy process. Yet, ‘Inter-Ministry Politics’ matter because the involvement of different ministries has different (re)distributive consequences and implications for representation and responsiveness. For example, we expect that climate, social, or immigration policies take different forms depending on whether the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, or the Ministry of Social Affairs are involved. But we lack systematic analysis of this important topic. Our ambition is to systematically gather and extend existing arguments and findings into a coherent perspective on the role of individual ministries for policy-making and to propose ‘Inter-Ministry Politics’ as a fruitful research agenda. In order to do so, we first systematically review existing public policy and public administration literature on the factors that influence the preferences of ministries as well as on their power to translate these preferences into policy output. Second, we illustrate the usefulness and importance of our ‘Inter-Ministry Politics’ approach by studying policy-making in Germany – a least likely case, due to its high number of veto points, its interwoven multilevel governance structure, and the ministerial bureaucracies’ rather low agenda-setting powers (Schnapp 2004). We coded the distributive profiles and responsible ministries for all adopted (social) policy proposals in the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2020. The analysis shows that different ministries indeed do result in different distributive profiles – even when holding the partisan composition of government and the policy field constant. Third, we conclude by developing a research agenda with at least three avenues: we need a more systematic understanding of 1) the role of individual ministries in the policy process, 2) substantial preferences of different ministries, and 3) the conditions under which ministries can ‘win’ the inter-ministerial political game and influence policy output.