Ministerial advisers in executive government: Out from the dark and into the limelight
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12329 |
| Author | Thurid Hustedt,Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen,Kristoffer Kolltveit |
SYMPOSIUM INTRODUCTION
Ministerial advisers in executive government:
Out from the dark and into the limelight
Thurid Hustedt
1
|Kristoffer Kolltveit
2
|Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen
3
1
Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science, Freie
Universität Berlin, Germany
2
Department of Public Administration and
Leadership, Oslo and Akershus University
College of Applied Sciences, Norway
3
Department of Management, University of
Aarhus, Denmark
Correspondence
Kristoffer Kolltveit, Department of Public
Administration and Leadership, Oslo
and Akershus University College of
Applied Sciences,
PO Box 4 St. Olavs plass,
NO-0130 Oslo, Norway.
Email: kristoffer.kolltveit@hioa.no
Ministers increasingly rely on advisers for support and advice.
In many countries, these political aides are labelled differently.
Generally, they serve as close confidants to their political masters
and operate in the ‘shadowland’between politics and bureaucracy.
Scholarship has dragged the ministerial advisers out of the dark
and described their background and functions. Still, the field of
scholarship has a Westminster bias, is characterized by single case
studies, and remains under-theorized. The lack of comparative
focus and theoretical underpinnings can be explained by the com-
plex nature of ministerial advisers. This introductory article sug-
gests a definition for ministerial advisers and reviews the extant
literature on these important actors. The main argument is that
the extent and relevance of ministerial advisers in executive gov-
ernment merits integration into mainstream public administration
and political science theory and research.
1|INTRODUCTION
Behind every politician in the limelight, advisers lurk in the dark. They are perceived as essential by and for their
political masters, and almost all ministers or heads of government rely on advisers to provide support and advice.
Such ministerial advisers have long attracted scientific interest. Since the 1990s, however, these advisers have
received renewed attention, predominantly in Westminster systems. A growing scholarship has emerged that empir-
ically assesses their advent, numbers, relationship to the permanent bureaucracy, and concomitant accountability
concerns about them (Maley 2000; Dahlström 2009; Eichbaum and Shaw 2010d). After having dragged ministerial
advisers out of the dark, scholars now argue for a ‘theoretical turn’in the study of ministerial advisers (Shaw and
Eichbaum 2015a, p. 1; 2015b, p. 66).
So far, comparative studies andintegration of advisers intothe realm of public administration research haveproven
difficult due tothe cross-national diversityof advisers’characteristics(Shaw and Eichbaum 2017). What these variants
of the species allhave in common, however, is thatthey are close confidants to theirpolitical masters, operatingin the
‘shadowland’of politics and bureaucracy. Besidesthat, ministerial advisers differacross a range of individual properties,
such as educational and professional backgrounds, formal positions, andthe actual work they do. In view of this diver-
sity, few attemptshave been made to find common groundfor the systematic analysisof ministerial advisers.
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12329
Public Administration. 2017;95:299–311.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.299
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