The partisan–professional dichotomy revisited: Politicization and decision‐making of senior civil servants
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12613 |
| Author | Sylvia Veit,Falk Ebinger,Nadin Fromm |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The partisan–professional dichotomy revisited:
Politicization and decision-making of senior civil
servants
Falk Ebinger
1
| Sylvia Veit
2
| Nadin Fromm
2
1
Department of Management,
Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien Institute for
Public Management and Governance, Wien,
Austria
2
Faculty of Economics and Management,
University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
Correspondence
Falk Ebinger, WU Vienna University of
Economics and Business, Department of
Management, Institute for Public
Management and Governance,
Welthandelsplatz 1, Building D2, 1090 Wien,
Austria.
Email: falk.ebinger@wu.ac.at
Abstract
Politicization has an ambivalent reputation among public
administration scholars. While considered an effective
instrument to safeguard political control over ministerial
bureaucracy, partisanship of senior civil servants is likewise
associated with patronage and is deemed detrimental to
professionalism and meritocracy. To scrutinize this contra-
diction, the article examines how the party-political back-
ground of senior civil servants influences their decision-
making behaviour. Two theoretically derived conceptions of
loyalty are therefore put to the test: responsiveness and
responsibility. Effects are captured by using the vignette
technique in 40 in-depth interviews with former senior civil
servants from ministerial departments at federal and state
level in Germany. The results are surprising in so far as they
reveal that politicized senior civil servants act neither more
responsively nor less responsibly than their non-politicized
peers. These findings challenge common assumptions and
call for a more refined analysis of the conditions under
which politicization leads to negativeeffects.
1|INTRODUCTION
Against the backdrop of societal and political dynamics in recent decades, public administration scholarship has been
concerned with the question of if and how political–administrative relations have changed in different countries. For
Received: 11 December 2018 Revised: 25 April 2019 Accepted: 4 June 2019
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12613
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;97:861–876. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm 861
Western democracies, the politicization of bureaucracy is at the core of this debate (Derlien 1996; Hood and Lodge
2006; Lewis 2009; van den Berg 2011; Dahlström and Niklasson 2013). According to B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre,
politicization can broadly be defined as ‘the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria in the selection,
retention, promotion, rewards, and disciplining of the public service’(Peters and Pierre 2004, p. 2). While this defini-
tion in itself is worded in a neutral way, the widespread attention the concept receives not solely in academic but
also in public discourse is fuelled by two aspects. First, it is observed that politicians or political parties expand their
influence over the bureaucracy (Kopecký et al. 2012; Peters 2013; Grønnegard Christensen et al. 2014), which is
perceived mostly in negative terms. Second, it is assumed (though not yet proven) that politicization changes the
behaviour of bureaucrats and hence modifies administrative decisions (Heclo 1977; Dahlström and Niklasson 2013;
Cooper 2018).
For parliamentary democracies in Continental European countries, the important role of ministerial officials in
the policy-making process has repeatedly been highlighted as the formulation, coordination and negotiation of poli-
cies as one of their main duties (Aberbach et al. 1981; Mayntz and Derlien 1989). Even though there is a clear legal
line between politics and administration, the reality (particularly for those officials in higher hierarchical ranks) is
more accurately described by the picture of a ‘blurred area, in which there is a degree of indeterminacy about the
roles and relationship between the two domains’(Alford et al. 2017). It is thus essential to not only explore the role
perception of ministerial officials but also their actual decision-making behaviour, its causes and consequences.
While the role perceptions of senior civil servants (SCS) as well as the politicization of ministerial bureaucracy
have recently received considerable scholarly attention (Aberbach et al. 1981; Page and Wright 1999; Aberbach and
Rockman 2000; Hustedt and Salomonsen 2018), the linkage to the decision-making behaviour of SCS has been
largely neglected. In particular, it is still unexplored whether ‘politicized’SCS act—as is often assumed—less responsi-
bly (towards the public interest) and more responsively (towards the minister's political will) than ‘non-politicized’
SCS. Moreover, a question still open for debate is how far the assumed lack of responsibility of politicized SCS
depends on institutional and country-specific characteristics. Answering these questions is particularly relevant for
countries with a highly politicized and influential civil service. While the Westminster model comprises quite strong
institutional constraints against the politicization of the bureaucracy (Halligan 2013), several Continental European
democracies show characteristics in the opposite direction (Page and Wright 1999; van den Berg 2011). Germany—
the case under consideration here—is one of those countries where the formal and functional politicization of SCS is
considered to be particularly high (Mayntz and Derlien 1989; Schwanke and Ebinger 2006; Fleischer 2016; Ebinger
et al. 2018).
Based on 40 personal in terviews with former SCS in German minist ries at the federal and state levels, this arti-
cle investigates whether the ‘degree’of party politicization of SCS indeed modifies their decision-making behav-
iour and, if so, in which ways. For this purpose, we apply a mixed-method approach by combining a qualitative
interview study wi th vignettes. Thes e vignettes are par tly drawn from Grønne gard Christensen and Opstrup
(2018, see also appendix) and refer to typical dilemma situations where SCS have to balance different n orms in
their decision-making. They thus reveal how SCS interpret the boundaries of loyalty to the minister in their
decision-makin g behaviour. For anal ytical purposes , two different dimensions of loyalty are distinguished:
(1) loyalty to the minister regarding political-tactical issues (responsiveness), and (2) loyalty to the minister regard-
ing policy issues, for example, by taking a cautionary stance when necessary to safeguard the public interest and
public integrity (responsibility).
The remainder of the article is divided into the following parts: in section 2, we highlight relevant research
strands on the politicization of bureaucracy, discuss core differences between Westminster states and Continental
Europe, and outline our theoretical concept. Section 3 introduces the key characteristics of the German case and
depicts our methods and data. In section 4, the empirical findings are presented. We discuss these findings in
section 5 before concluding the article by outlining future research avenues in politicizationresearch.
862 EBINGER ET AL.
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