Politicians, political advisers and the vocabulary of public service bargains: Speaking in tongues?
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12281 |
| Author | Richard Shaw,Chris Eichbaum |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
Politicians, political advisers and the vocabulary
of public service bargains: Speaking in tongues?
Richard Shaw
1
|Chris Eichbaum
2
1
Department of Politics, Massey University,
New Zealand
2
School of Government, Victoria University of
Wellington, New Zealand
Correspondence
Richard Shaw, Department of Politics, Massey
University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
Email: R.H.Shaw@massey.ac.nz
Recent research on political advisers is characterized by an expan-
sion beyond Westminster and clearer connections with proximate
literatures. This article speaks to the second of these features by
applying the Public Service Bargain (PSB) lens to minister/political
adviser relationships in new ways. Extant PSB analyses either posi-
tion political advisers as an independent variable influencing the
core bargain between ministers and senior officials, or face difficul-
ties when viewing advisers through existing perspectives devel-
oped to explain deals between politicians and public servants.
Consequently, the nature of ‘the bargain applying to political advi-
sers’(Hood and Lodge 2006, p. 128) remains unclear. This article
addresses that lacuna by deploying the reward, competence and
loyalty dimensions of PSBs to specify the broad terms of the politi-
cal adviser bargain, and considers the theoretical and empirical
implications of such compacts.
1|INTRODUCTION
In 1948 New Zealand’s first professor of political science, Leslie Lipson, observed that:
With the political parties the modern [New Zealand] civil service has struck a mutually beneficial
bargain. By guaranteeing to public servants a life’s career and a pension, parties have foresworn the
use of patronage and have guaranteed to the state’s employees the tenure of their jobs. In return
the parties expect, and the public servants owe, equal loyalty to any government which the people
have placed in office. (Lipson 1948, p. 479; cited in Lodge 2009, p. 53)
Lipson anticipated by some 25 years what has become the orthodox definition of the Public Service Bargain
(PSB) articulated by Schaffer (1973). The matter of why we refer to the Schafferian rather than the Lipsonian bar-
gain is moot, but the relevance of such compacts to those interested in political advisers is not. For while there is
now a considerable literature on PSBs, the complexion of the bargains between ministers and their political advisers,
and their bearing on the traditional PSB, is only now attracting the scholarly gaze. Moreover, there has been little
application of the insights from the PSB scholarship to the work of political advisers. In short, there is some distance
DOI 10.1111/padm.12281
312 © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltdwileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padmPublic Administration. 2017;95:312–326.
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