The Politics of Bureaucracy

Public sector organizations and public officials at various levels of government are key players in the policy process. Civil servants and political appointees are deeply involved in agenda setting and in policy making, and street-level bureaucrats crucially influence policy outputs and shape the public image of the government. At the same time, bureaucracy itself is profoundly affected by political decision-making, for instance through structural or personnel management reforms. Indeed, much of the literature on the ‘administrative factor’ in the policy process deals with politico-administrative relations, and more specifically, with the tension between political control and bureaucratic self-interest and autonomy by investigating the drivers of bureaucratic behaviour. The goal of this Section is to push this research agenda forward by explicitly adopting a political science perspective on public administration to study how political processes affect public bureaucracies, and vice versa.