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. Panels: 1. Comparing the politicization of the executive triangle 1 Chairs: Jan Meyer-Sahling (University of Nottingham) & Tobias Bach (University of Oslo) 2. Comparing the politicization of the executive triangle 2 Chairs: 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. These two panel invite papers that describe trends and explore the causes and consequences of civil service politicization. In particular, we seek papers analyzing political discretion in the recruitment and removal of civil servants across countries or over time, address loyalty-competence trade-offs in patronage appointments, and examine different types of positions and career backgrounds within the "executive triangle" comprising politicians, advisers, and civil servants. 3. Politicization, Discretion, and Institutional Power Under Populist Pressures Chair: Kutsal Yesilkagit (Leiden University) This panel focuses on the politicization of public administration and the contestation of bureaucratic authority under populist and illiberal pressures. The papers explore how political parties, governments, and publics reshape discretion, personnel systems, and institutional power relations, combining empirical analyses with institutional perspectives. Collectively, the panel advances understanding of how bureaucratic autonomy and legitimacy are challenged and reconfigured in contemporary democracies. 4. Bureaucratic Responses to Democratic Erosion Chair: Kutsal Yesilkagit (Leiden University) This panel examines how core bureaucratic actors respond to populist pressure and democratic erosion at the national level. The contributions analyse patterns of compliance, dissent, resistance, and exit among civil servants and legal professionals, drawing on surveys, experiments, and mixed-methods evidence. Together, the papers illuminate the micro-foundations of bureaucratic agency in contexts of political polarisation and democratic stress. 5. Government Ministries as Policy Actors: Unpacking ministerial logics and politics and their effects Chairs: 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 6. Climate governance for acceleration of emissions reductions Chairs: 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. 7. Overburdened Bureaucracies: Organizational & Street Level Responses to Administrative Overload Chair: Yves Steinebach (University of Oslo) 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. 8. Expertise in bureaucracies and policy-making Chairs: 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. 9. Unpacking Political-Administrative Relations Across Systems Chairs: Kristoffer Kolltveit (University of Oslo) & Thurid Hustedt (Hertie School) The panel shed light on the finely tuned interplay between ministers, political advisors and senior civil servants, the executive triangle. Some papers provide detailed insights into individual countries, while others show how the relationship varies across countries, and depend on policy areas, political culture and administrative traditions. 10. Roles, Policy-Making and Executive-Legislative Relations Chairs: Thurid Hustedt (Hertie School) & Kristoffer Kolltveit (University of Oslo) The panel investigates the different roles of the various participants in the executive triangle: ministers, advisors and civil servants, as well as relations between the executive and parliament. Further on, the panel sheds light on the output of their interactions, like public policies and legislation.