Navigating the dichotomy: The top public servant's craft
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | Erik‐Jan Dorp,Paul ’t Hart |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12600 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Navigating the dichotomy: The top public
servant’s craft
Erik-Jan van Dorp | Paul ’t Hart
Utrecht University School of Governance,
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Correspondence
Erik-Jan van Dorp, Utrecht University School
of Governance, Utrecht University,
Bijlhouwerstraat 6, 3511ZC Utrecht,
The Netherlands.
Email: g.h.vandorp@uu.nl
Funding information
Erik-Jan van Dorp’s work on this article was
supported financially by the Ministry of the
Interior and Kingdom Affairs of the
Netherlands. Paul ’t Hart’s work on this
project was supported by funding from the
European Research Council (ERC) under the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme (grant agreement
no. 694266).
Abstract
How in their day-to-day practices do top public servants
straddle the politics–administration dichotomy (PAD), which
tells them to serve and yet influence their ministers at the
same time? To examine this, we discuss how three informal
‘rules of the game’govern day-to-day political–administrative
interactions in the Dutch core executive: mutual respect,
discretionary space, and reciprocal loyalty. Drawing from
31 hours of elite-interviews with one particular (authorita-
tive) top public servant,who served multiple prime ministers,
and supplementaryinterviews with his (former) ministers and
co-workers, we illustrate the top public servants’craft of
responsively and yet astutely straddling the ambiguous
boundaries between ‘politics’and ‘administration’.Weargue
that if PAD-driven scholarship on elite administrative work is
to remain relevant, it has to come to terms with the
boundary-blurring impacts of temporal interactions, the
emergence of ‘hybrid’ministerial advisers, and the ‘thicken-
ing’of accountability regimes that affects both politicians
and public servants.
1|INTRODUCTION
Much of what public administration researchers know about top public servants traditionally comes from institu-
tional analysis (Raadschelders and Van der Meer 2014) and survey research (Hammerschmid et al. 2017) shedding
light on constitutional and organizational settings, reward structures, as well as demographic features and attitudes.
This, however, does not reveal much about what it is these elite public servants actually do—how they navigate the
Received: 8 November 2018 Revised: 7 February 2019 Accepted: 24 March 2019
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12600
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2019 The Author. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Public Administration. 2019;97:877–891. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm 877
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