Loyalty and Competence in Administrative Appointments: Comparing Administrative Leaders´ Backgrounds and Career Profiles in Europe

There is now a relatively dense scholarship looking at the presence and intensity of politicization of the bureaucracy, with increasing attention oriented towards semi-autonomous, non-majoritarian organizations such as public agencies. In this body of research so far, there has been a clear focus on the partisan-political backgrounds of top officials. In the U.S. context, the literature revolves around the question whether political loyalty have been favored over competence and expertise in the filling of administrative leadership positions. There is little, if any, research on the relative importance of loyalty and competence in the recruitment of administrative leaders in the European context, and our endeavor is to fill that gap. The paper is centered on the identification of resources and the attribution of career profiles to administrative leaders, some of these leaning towards the political and partisan, while some other learning towards the possession of relevant, substantive, and wide-ranging expertise, or towards the proven ability to lead major public or private sector organizations. We seek to capture systematic and significant variations in these profiles across time, across administrative systems, but also along organizational and policy domains. We argue that apparent profile variations are informative about the logics presiding over both the recruitment and retention of administrative leaders. This study contributes to the literature on the politicization of public sector appointments by proposing an original research design that allows for extracting and categorizing the different resources possessed by administrative leaders (political, professional, educational, etc.) and for meaningfully and systematically comparing administrative leaders’ profiles. In addition to uncovering the breath of political-partisan backgrounds, we also propose unique measurement strategies to be able to infer about the degree of competence and qualifications of each administrative leaders to occupy the post. The paper elaborates a conceptual framework on the balancing of loyalty and competence and puts the framework to an empirical test, drawing on newly collected biographical data covering several countries and policy domains.