The Ministerial Logic of Institutional Change: Long-Term Reform Trajectories and Interest Group Influence in France, Germany, and the Netherlands

The literature on bureaucratic politics and public administration has long emphasized the specificity of ministries in terms of their policy preferences, organizational cultures, and their capacity to defend jurisdictional boundaries. While these works provide important insights into how ministries behave and interact, much less attention has been paid to the long-term trajectories of organizational change affecting ministerial structures. In particular, the question of whether ministries display sector-specific patterns of organizational transformation over extended periods remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by examining the long-term evolution of ministerial organizations since the 1980s. It investigates whether recurring patterns can be identified in ministerial reorganizations across different policy sectors, and whether policy domains shape how ministerial structures are reconfigured over time. Rather than treating organizational change as a series of isolated reforms, the paper adopts a longitudinal perspective to analyze cumulative and path-dependent dynamics of transformation. By focusing on the relationship between policy domains and organizational trajectories, the paper contributes to a better understanding of how sectoral characteristics influence the content, scope, and frequencies of change. The first hypothesis we will test is descriptive: we expect that ministries in charge of the same policy sector might share similar patterns of change trajectories across countries. There are many reasons in the literature why central government administrations may become more similar in the same policy field: structural characteristics, policy tasks, or similar environmental pressures. We may, however, also expect some differences across countries in the same policy field when the historical making of this field has been different. Our second line of argument relates to the influence of interest groups in policy domains. We argue that the shaping of ministerial structures is shaped by politicians, top bureaucrats, and organised interests. Hence, these processes are also characterized by competition among bureaucratic units and by negotiations with interest groups that seek to preserve or expand their access to state resources. Ministerial changes therefore follow a sectoral logic, in which both senior bureaucrats and societal actors are deeply invested in how administrative boundaries are drawn, maintained, or altered. Bureaucrats defend their organisation’s jurisdiction, expertise, and autonomy, while interest groups seek institutional arrangements that secure stable channels of influence. In this paper, we analyse how these sectoral dynamics shape the organisation of ministries and test empirically how they are reflected in the structural patterns observed in our dataset. We will compare ministerial changes in four policy sectors (Finances, Foreign affairs, Environment and Social and Labour Affairs) across three countries (France, Germany and the Netherlands) from 1980 to 2014. The data for our quantitative study is drawn from the German, Dutch and French subsets of a novel large‐scale SOG-PRO dataset that captures internal structural changes in central bureaucracies, based on information from state almanacs, government yearbooks, and organizational charts.