Bureaucracy formation in Western Europe: Structural change in government organizations, 1815-1870

Bureaucratic growth and specialisation are the main processes affecting XIXth century central governments in Western Europe. There are three ways to look at this bureaucracy formation. Many works have looked at public service professionalisation or on government spending. Yet, one can also study the structure of the organisations forming central governments. So far, the literature only provides sparse and descriptive evidence, although it complements our understanding on bureaucracy formation, as it also offers a more fine-grained analysis. We use existing longitudinal data and a novel dataset uncovering the organisational transformations of central governments in four European states: Prussia, (Sweden-)Norway, France and the UK, from 1815 to 1870. 1815 marks the end of the Napoleonic wars and a new order in Europe, institutionalised via the Vienna Congress. In 1870, the Germany is unified when France’s Empire comes to an end. The UK public service undergoes a professionalisation process at the same time. In Norway, a constitutional amendment required ministers to meet in Parliament to defend their policies in the early 1870s. In this paper, we test four hypotheses about the growth and rationalisation processes occurring in the organisations of central government measuring the influence of constitutional changes, economic transformations, budgets, wars, and policies. The first hypothesis links the number of organisational changes and growth of central government to the major changes affecting the constitutional environment. France experienced four political regime changes during the XIXth century and the United-Kingdom underwent several constitutional changes. Do constitutional changes provide opportunities for organisational change or growth? Are some constitutional regimes more closely associated to central government changes or growth? The second hypothesis is based on the economic environment – namely, the industrial revolution as captured by GDP growth, urbanisation and industrialisation - that could have an effect on central government. Central government organisations would change according to the economic and societal needs resulting from industrial revolution upheavals. The third hypothesis tests the influence of public spending in different policy domains over organisational changes. To larger tasks, novel (re)-organisations? A fourth hypothesis tests a classic hypothesis; wars are said to foster state formation. Do wars influence specialisation processes and the growth of central government during the early XIXth century? Lastly, we study the patterns of change across policy domains: do ministries residing over different policy domains experience the same change?