In many established democracies ministers are surrounded by personal advisors. Even in a number of Westminster-styled jurisdictions the emergence of political staff as a new and distinctive element in executive government has been viewed as an institutional change designed to effect a movement along the continuum between neutral and responsive competence (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010). In other countries, such as those in Southern Europe, political staff units are instead a longstanding feature of executive government acting as governance structures that often leave the civil service not only marginalized in rendering policy advice but also frustrated in the execution of policy programmes (Sotiropoulos 2004). At the analytical level, the paper develops a range of modes of policy advice politicization that differ with respect to the actual balancing of professional policy advice and political control. Modes of policy advice politicization serve as an analytical tool to assess the role of political advisers in executive government with the help of three sets of variables. The first deals with patterns of party competition. The second set looks at senior executives’ patterns of recruitment and career advancement. The third set includes administrative traditions and features of the state structure. At the empirical level, the paper is focused on ministerial cabinets as institutionalized political support units in the Italian case. It adopts a case study design to investigate both the organizational make-up of ministerial cabinets and their policy functions across time and sectors in order to set the scene for broader cross-national research in the future. The effects of ministerial cabinets’ institutionalization on governmental policy-making are assessed with reference to the role played by personal advisors in determining the implementation gap which affected efforts to embed Impact Assessment (IA) practices in the Italian public sector.
