Political control of coordination? The roles of ministerial advisers in government coordination in Denmark and Sweden
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Heidi H. Salomonsen,Thurid Hustedt |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12312 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
Political control of coordination? The roles of
ministerial advisers in government coordination in
Denmark and Sweden
Thurid Hustedt
1
|Heidi H. Salomonsen
2
1
Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science, Freie
Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2
Department of Management, Aarhus
University, Denmark
Correspondence
Heidi H. Salomonsen, Department of
Management, Aarhus University, Aarhus,
Denmark
Email: hhs@mgmt.au.dk
Ministerial advisers are said to strengthen the political control of
bureaucracy. Using a comparative case design, this article investi-
gates this claim by studying the roles of ministerial advisers in gov-
ernment coordination in Denmark and Sweden. The article
demonstrates how the roles of advisers differ in coordination:
Swedish advisers directly control government coordination
through hierarchical authority. The roles of advisers and bureau-
crats are functionally differentiated in coordination. In contrast,
Danish advisers play a more indirect role in coordination. Rather
than controlling coordination, they serve to reproduce the func-
tional politicization of the permanent bureaucracy in government
coordination. The findings underline the relevance of including
advisers in the future study of government coordination. The analysis
is based on 48 interviews with advisers and top civil servants in
Denmark and Sweden.
1|INTRODUCTION
Reflecting on ‘the twin political and administrative nature of the executive’(Goetz 2003, p. 79), government coordi-
nation represents an example par excellence of the shadowland of politics and administration. This shadowland has
been filled with ministerial advisers and yet has hardly attracted scholarly attention –either in research on advisers
or in the study of coordination.
On the one hand, the mounting research on ministerial advisers has predominantly investigated their impact on
the provision of advice to ministers, their recruitment and formal regulation as well as the different roles they per-
form in policy-making (Eichbaum and Shaw 2010; Shaw and Eichbaum 2015a), although a few studies touch on the
coordinating role played by advisers (Connaughton 2010; Eichbaum and Shaw 2011; Maley 2011). On the other
hand, research on coordination has been preoccupied with studying government coordination mechanisms and
structures on both the political levels and the bureaucratic levels immediately beneath the ‘political veneer’(Goetz
2003, p. 74) while ignoring the fact that advisers have by now become an institutionalized property in many
governments.
DOI 10.1111/padm.12312
Public Administration. 2017;95:393–406.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd393
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