Substitute Venues? Policy Production Beyond Organizational Responsibilities

Ministerial bureaucracies are purposefully designed to aid governments in producing and designing public policies. Despite this, several issues that fall outside or in between the formal structures and tasks of ministries. Governments do of course still have to produce policy on such issues. Though some governments address this by organizational reform, other issues must be dealt with within the existing structures of the bureaucracy. The purpose of this article is to examine how such policies are assigned. Or rather, to what extent does the personal traits of cabinet ministers explain the production of policy bills outside of the ministry’s core tasks? Producing bills outside of formal organizational structure may grant the cabinet minister with more leeway in policy design and serve as a way to signaling competence. Several hypotheses based on the political experience of cabinet ministers are tested by examining the substantive policy content of parliamentary bills using the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) codebook. Using a dataset of the policy responsibilities of ministries, all bills are then classified as either within or outside of the ministries core tasks. Several binomial regression models are run on a dataset containing all parliamentary bills presented to the Norwegian Storting, 1985-2024.