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. The goal of this section is to promote this research agenda by explicitly adopting a political science perspective on public administration to study how political processes affect public bureaucracies, and vice versa. The section’s proposed panels address this general theme from different angles. The section invites paper proposals for all these panels. Panels: 1. Comparing the politicization of the executive triangle Tobias Bach (University of Oslo) & Jan Meyer-Sahling (University of Nottingham) The balance between political control and professional autonomy in the hiring and firing of civil servants is a longstanding topic in research on executive government. This panel invites papers that describe trends and explore the causes and consequences of civil service politicization. In particular, we seek papers that analyze political discretion in the recruitment and removal of civil servants across countries or over time, address loyalty-competence trade-offs in patronage appointments, examine different types of positions and career backgrounds within the executive triangle comprising politicians, advisers, and civil servants, or explore new approaches to measuring politicization, such as career data. 2. Bureaucratic Battlegrounds: Public Administration under Populist Pressure and Democratic Erosion Chairs: Gabriela Lotta (FGV) & Kutsal Yesilkagit (Leiden University) This panel explores how democratic erosion affects the institutional design, functioning, and legitimacy of public administration. It invites contributions that examine the interplay between populist strategies, bureaucratic restructuring, and the weakening of liberal-democratic safeguards. Topics may include politicization of the civil service, erosion of meritocratic norms, bureaucratic politics, street-level bureaucracy, and the role of administrative institutions in resisting or enabling illiberal governance. By integrating perspectives from comparative politics, public administration, and democratic theory, the panel seeks to advance a research agenda that situates bureaucratic institutions at the center of contemporary struggles over democratic resilience and institutional integrity. 3. Government Ministries as Policy Actors: Unpacking ministerial logics and politics and their effects Ilana Shpaizman (Bar-Ilan University) & Reut Marciano (Hebrew University) Government ministries are important to policymaking—they are active in designing, implementing, and evaluating public policies. Yet their unique role remains underexplored. Very recently, however, policy and bureaucratic politics research has begun to focus on ministries and their distinct policy, politics, and logics. This type of work assumes that different ministries (e.g., finance, welfare, foreign affairs) operate according to distinct logics and politics, which condition how they approach policymaking. This panel invites works on bureaucratic politics that examine 1. The role of individual ministries in the policy process and the relations between them 2. The way ministerial logic shapes and develops 3. The power relations between ministries and the conditions that affect them 4. Climate governance for acceleration of emissions reductions Elin Lerum Boasson (University of Oslo) & Jale Tosun (University of Heidelberg) Governments set up increasingly complex climate governance systems, and a nascent public administration literature examines differences across countries and explores the effect on emissions. This panel invites papers assessing organizational structures and decision-making processes of climate governance, applying qualitative and quantitative methods. 5. Overburdened Bureaucracies: Organizational & Street Level Responses to Administrative Overload Yves Steinebach (University of Oslo) & Alexa Lenz (Ludwig-Maximilians-University) Overburdened bureaucracies have become a defining feature of public administration in advanced democracies. Amid expanding policy demands and stagnant capacities, public organizations struggle to maintain core functions. This overburdening reflects not just rising workloads, but a deeper structural mismatch between growing implementation demands and stagnating, or even declining administrative capacities across levels and sectors. This panel brings together scholars examining how bureaucracies, particularly at the street level, manage persistent overload. We focus on the everyday realities of how public organizations and their employees cope with these pressures and invite contributions on coping strategies, organizational routines, and innovations that sustain administrative performance and capacity. 6. Expertise in bureaucracies and policy-making Johan Christensen (Leiden University) & Jesper Dahl Kelstrup (Roskilde University) Expert knowledge is one of the main ingredients of policy-making in public bureaucracies. Not only may bureaucrats themselves play an important expert advisory role; executive bureaucracies also rely on various organizational arrangements for incorporating expertise in policy-making, including dedicated science advisors and knowledge units, expert agencies, and permanent and temporary advisory bodies. The panel invites papers that examine the organization and practices of expert advice in national governments and European and international organizations, and the politics, use and influence of expert knowledge in policy processes at all levels. 7. Political-administrative relations in executive policymaking Kristoffer Kolltveit (University of Oslo) & Thurid Hustedt (Hertie School) Ministers, political advisors and senior civil servants operate in a finely tuned interplay where influence and roles depend on resources, policy areas, political culture and administrative traditions. This interaction cannot always be understood from formal guidelines and job descriptions, as these actors may have more (or less) influence than their position indicates. The panel welcomes papers that shed light on this interplay across countries, policy areas, or time, and/or investigate how political-administrative relations function in modern day executive policymaking with a fragmented media landscape, more diverse sources of expertise, and increased political polarization. 8. Novel approaches to comparing bureaucracies across time and space Marlene Jugl (Bocconi University) & Diego Salazar-Morales (Leiden University) Comparative public administration is a growing subfield that compares various institutions, practices, and traditions in public administration, thus moving beyond the dominant Western (European) cases. While the importance of considering non-Western public administration is widely recognized, studies often remain comparable, a juxtaposition of contemporary country cases, rather than adopting truly comparative research designs. And while the influence of historical legacies is a central argument in comparative public administration, legacies and path dependency are often assumed rather than empirically analyzed. This panel invites contributions that employ rigorous methods, quantitative or qualitative, to compare administrative institutions or practices at macro level (countries) or meso level (agencies, ministries etc.) either between countries or within countries over time.