The Politics of Bureaucracy

Public organizations and officials at various levels of government are key players in the policy process. At the same time, bureaucracy itself is profoundly affected by political decision-making. Among the key themes in the literature on politico-administrative relations are tensions between political control and bureaucratic autonomy, and different explanations of the drivers of bureaucratic and political behaviour, both at the individual and the organizational level. This Section aims to promote this research agenda by adopting a political science perspective on public administration to study how political processes affect public bureaucracies, and vice versa. Panel 1: Whose Agents? Sub-National Bureaucracies and the Ground-Level Application of Supranational Law Chairs: Ole Andreas Danielsen and Jarle Trondal Sub-national bureaucracies, specifically municipal administrations, perform a key role with respect to the practical application of European Union (EU) regulations and directives. What behavioural premises permeate decision-making processes during this stage of the policy cycle, and in particular, how municipal bureaucrats balance steering signals from different levels of governance, remains largely understudied in the literature focusing on municipalities and the implementation of EU law. As a step towards enhancing our understanding of these processes and, by extension, the role of municipal bureaucracies in EU multilevel governance, this Panel invites Papers that scrutinize decision-making processes pertaining to the ground-level application of supranational law. Panel 2: Ministerial Advisers in Patronage Bureaucracies Chairs: Katarina Staronova and Marek Rybar Ministerial advisers have become an established feature of administrative systems. Existing works typically focus on how advisers shape executive politics in systems with a politically neutral, meritocratic civil service. Administrations with civil servants (de)selected by ministers and political parties are less explored. This Panel welcomes Papers that explore political (e.g., media communication, tactical political advice, coalition management) and policy-related (e.g., agenda setting, policy development and policy implementation) roles of advisers and politically appointed civil servants. Papers may look at factors that influence how civil servants and advisers share administrative roles, and what (if any) unique roles are played by ministerial advisers. Panel 3: Inter-Ministry Politics: Ministers, Ministries, and the Politics of Policy-Making Chairs: Katrijn Siderius, Stine Hesstvedt & Johan Christensen We know surprisingly little about the role of individual ministries in the policy process. Yet, inter-ministry politics matter because the involvement of different ministries has different (re)distributive consequences and implications for representation, responsiveness and knowledge use in policy-making. Panel 4: The politics of public sector appointments in comparative perspective Chairs: Tobias Bach and Jan Meyer-Sahling There is a significant literature on patronage appointments for senior positions in the public sector. A large part of this literature focuses on the party politicization of appointments, yet disregards the relative importance of appointee competence. However, whereas trade-offs between loyalty and competence in public sector appointments have been studied extensively in the United States, we know much less about such trade-offs in other contexts. This Panel especially invites Papers that empirically analyse loyalty and competence in public sector appointments in a comparative perspective. Panel 5: The Politics of Bureaucratic Reputation Chairs: Dovilė Rimkutė and Moshe Maor Bureaucratic reputation scholarship has demonstrated that bureaucratic organizations adjust decision-making practices, produce diverse outputs, and engage in targeted communication strategies to build, maintain, or enhance their reputation. In other words, reputational considerations have been found to affect bureaucracies’ behaviour, processes and outputs in important ways. However, we still have a limited understanding of the effects of these efforts and the conditions under which bureaucratic actors succeed (or fail) in cultivating their regulatory power, autonomy, authority, legitimacy and/or engender citizen trust. To what extent are public organizations successful in cultivating support from their audiences? This Panel invites theoretical and empirical Papers. Panel 6: Computational Institutional Analysis of Bureaucracies Chairs: Alessia Damonte and Christopher Frantz Bureaucracies are crucial to policy performance and qualify political regimes. Theories portray them as inertial or responsive, entrepreneurial or risk-averse, siloed or collaborative, vulnerable to capture or stalwart. Such diversity is ascribed to differences in the configurations of rules that shape their structure, coordination, and agency. However, the mechanisms connecting specific rule configurations to models of bureaucratic agency and delivered goods and values can seldom rely on systematic and credible evidence as prescriptions may need. This Panel invites Papers that discuss how computational tools can help gauge, render, and evaluate these mechanisms and the conditions for scaling them up. Panels 7 and 8: Bureaucracy and Democracy in Dark Times Chairs: Kutsal Yesilkagit, B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, Michael W. Bauer Democracies have come under attack worldwide as authoritarian backsliders conquer power in ever more countries. Backsliding or outright autocratic governments set their political systems and public administrations on an anti-pluralist trajectory. Such transformations dismantle liberal democratic institutions and political cultures. Public administration systems stand in the centre of backsliding conflicts. This Panel thus invites Papers about the role of state bureaucracies and bureaucrats under would-be autocratic rule. What happens to public administration when populists or outright autocrats take power? Of particular interest are the institutional and collective reactions of the bureaucracy as response to backsliding efforts of authoritarian populist / autocratic governments. What is the concrete impact of backsliders on the civil service and policymaking as well as on policy output in comparative perspective? Is there an obligation, individually and collectively, of a public service, to ensure the integrity of the democratic political order against transformative efforts of backsliders? How can democratic administration be made resilient in face of populist challenges? And what do we know about public administration systems that 'survived' populist rule? Will democratic cultures just bounce back, or do we need to remain alert to potential illiberal legacies, perhaps paving the way for an even more comprehensive transformation in the next round, when authoritarian-leaning leaders return to power?