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 reorganizations or personnel management. 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 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.