Exploring the Role of Ministerial Advisers in the Executive Triangle: Flemish Ministerial Advisers from 2000 - 2020

Over the past decade, ministerial advisors have increasingly garnered academic interest, primarily studied within the context of the 'executive triangle'—the dynamic interaction between ministers, bureaucrats, and advisors. Despite growing research, most existing studies are either theoretical or empirical yet largely descriptive. This paper aims to bridge the gap by integrating theoretical frameworks on ministerial advisorship with comprehensive empirical data on Flemish ministerial advisors from 2000 to 2020. We explore pivotal questions: Do ministerial advisors function more as politicians in bureaucratic roles, or as bureaucrats in political settings? How do existing typologies hold up against empirical data? Our research utilizes two datasets: a newly compiled dataset detailing career trajectories of Flemish ministerial advisors from 2000 to 2020, and a dataset encompassing all parliamentary documents from the same period. We employ a natural language processing (NLP) pipeline for analysis. Initially, mention detection identifies advisors' names in parliamentary documents. Subsequently, tools like coreference resolution extract relevant paragraphs. These paragraphs are then encoded for statistical analysis, enabling us to delve into the nuanced roles and variations within the ministerial advisor population. This study not only provides a theoretical and empirical synthesis on ministerial advisors but also presents a novel methodological approach in political science research, leveraging NLP techniques to extract and analyze data from parliamentary records.