Bureaucratic dilemmas: Civil servants between political responsiveness and normative constraints

Christensen, Jørgen Grønnegård; Opstrup, Niels

doi:10.1111/gove.12312

Cited by 45 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…It is a shibboleth of liberal democracies that the interests of fair, stable and continuous government are served by the operation of a neutral bureaucracy. Equally, one of the perennial dilemmas of democratic governance is how to provide political executives with advice that is simultaneously impartial and sensitive to the political context in which they operate (Aberbach and Rockman 1994; Page and Wright 1999; Christensen and Opstrup 2018).…”

Section: Setting the Theoretical Scene: Responsive And Responsible Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Bubbling up or cascading down? Public servants, political advisers and politicization

Shaw

Eichbaum

2020

Public Administration

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One of the strands in the growing scholarship on political advisers in parliamentary democracies proposes that advisers can reduce the risk of civil service politicization by furnishing partisan advice to ministers, freeing civil servants to focus on the provision of expert competence. This benign narrative generates a significant hypothesis, which is that the institutionalization of the partisan role diminishes the risk of civil service politicization. That hypothesis has yet to be fully tested. Several studies have assessed the impact of advisers' actions on civil service impartiality, but the consequences of bureaucrats' own agency for that dependent variable have received far less attention. Drawing on data from a survey of New Zealand public servants, this article challenges the assumption in the political advisers literature that civil service politicization is primarily driven by exogenous factors and calls for a more nuanced theoretical approach to endogenous aspects of politicization.

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Section: Setting the Theoretical Scene: Responsive And Responsible Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Bubbling up or cascading down? Public servants, political advisers and politicization

Shaw

Eichbaum

2020

Public Administration

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“…One way to begin understanding the behavior of the actors in these interactions is through experiments, whether survey or laboratory (see Christensen and Opstrup 2018). For example, I have mentioned the populist surge in many countries and its possible infl uence on the interactions of politicians and bureaucrats.…”

Section: Studying the Relationship Of Bureaucrats And Politiciansmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Bureaucracy: A Continuing Saga

Peters

2020

NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration and Policy

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“…In effect, SpAds occupy a narrow space between elected politicians and the formal structures of the civil service (Hazell et al, 2012;Christensen and Opstrup, 2018). However, SpAds carry with their role referent power and the authority of the Minister they serve.…”

Section: Spads In the Uk Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

SpAds: Political Sherpas Bridging Minister and Civil Servant

Kakabadse¹,

Kakabadse²

2020

OJPS

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This paper examines how opinion-shaping political and civil service stakeholders view the role and contribution of Special Political Advisers (SpAds) within the Westminster system of government. The literature only recently paid considered attention to this role, partly due to the recent reforms that spawned the emergence of SpAds, but also because political advisers still only represent a small population within the government community. It is acknowledged that each country's institutional and administrative traditions greatly influence SpAds' tasks; arrangements with the UK being no exception. Recognising that SpAds take on the role of "temporary civil servants" whose duties vary according to ministerial direction, the study reported in this paper concludes that SpAds can make an invaluable contribution to policy delivery by acting as a bridge between Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary. The capability to bridge the tensions between ministerial urgency to realise policy goals and civil servant realism to accurately assess the "fracture points" to be overcome in the process of policy delivery is reported as particularly valued by the public official. This paper concludes that the SpAd's relentless pursuit of the Minister's agenda is distinctly counterproductive for both Minister and civil servant, but adopting the function of bridging across contrasting interests enhances policy delivery effectiveness.

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Bureaucratic dilemmas: Civil servants between political responsiveness and normative constraints

Cited by 45 publications

References 34 publications

Bubbling up or cascading down? Public servants, political advisers and politicization

Bubbling up or cascading down? Public servants, political advisers and politicization

The Politics of Bureaucracy: A Continuing Saga

SpAds: Political Sherpas Bridging Minister and Civil Servant

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