The Quiet Politicization of Government Commissions

Government commissions play a crucial role in shaping and legitimizing policies. However, for political principals, commissions present a delegation problem as they operate outside the bureaucratic hierarchy, and the government cannot completely control their output. In this paper, we take a novel step to understand the politicization of commission appointments, a topic that has received remarkably little attention in the literature. Arguing that governments have more discretion when appointing commission members than civil servants, we hypothesize that appointments to commissions are more politicized than appointments to other bureaucratic bodies in a meritocratic system. Linking data on more than 10 000 members of government commissions with data on all candidates for local and national elections in Norway 1970-2022, we study the dynamics of quiet politicization. We show that a significant share of commission members have previously stood for election and that these members are more likely to have partisan affiliation with the government when they are not explicitly appointed based on their political roles. Moreover, we find that the degree of politicization changes with the electoral cycle. Our findings shed light on the political dynamics of appointments and political control of expert knowledge in meritocratic systems.