The Temporal Dynamics of Political Change and Top Civil Servant Turnover

The use of political criteria in the recruitment and turnover of top civil servants in government ministries and arm’s-length agencies have been heavily debated in democratic countries throughout the last century, resulting in differing limitations to politicians’ formal influence across political contexts. Whereas previous research in the high-merit context has largely expected the effects of political change on top civil servants to be the same regardless of variance in the political change, this paper shows that there are hierarchical and temporal nuances to how different types of political change affects turnover rates among top civil servants. Theoretically the paper argues that different changes in the political environment affects the government’s degree of skepticism towards the political responsiveness and ideological compatibility of the top civil servants, and that time constraints when entering office limits ministers to seek to replace the most functionally politicized top civil servants. Deploying Cox-Regression on a novel dataset on 841 top civil servants in Norwegian ministries between 1884 and 2021 and 316 Agency Heads in 84 Norwegian Agencies 1994-2021, the paper shows that a change in government increases the hazard of turnover among top civil servants in ministries by about 37%, and that this hazard is doubled when the turnover in government results in a political party taking office for the first time. However, the effect of a change in government is more than twice the size for the top civil servants that are employed directly under the minister, halved for general directors of ministry departments, and non-significant with a negative estimate for agency heads. Further evidence of hierarchical distance to the minister mediating the effect of government turnover on top civil servants is provided by a difference-in-difference analysis that utilizes the staggered introduction of permanent secretaries in Norwegian ministries between 1925 and 1987.