Power Resources of Parliamentary Executives: Policy Advice in the UK and Germany

This article compares the institutionalisation of policy advice inside offices which service chief executives in the UK and Germany. It focuses on the institutionalisation of ‘policy units’ during the early 1970s and late 1990s which reveals different patterns. Whereas British policy units are allowed to interfere in any departmental business and address a variety of issues, German policy units are narrowed to provide administrative support and avoid partisan issues. Applying a new institutionalist perspective and the veto approach, this article argues that institutionalisation processes as strategic interactions of organisational actors are affected by institutional features at the macro-level of parliamentary systems. These features include principles of cabinet decision-making and the electoral system with its effects on parliament and cabinet composition which both set veto positions in the executive and legislative decision arena. Next to these institutional features, the empirical evidence shows how organisational legacies account for the influential role of British policy units as power resource for the PM and the nearly irrelevance of German policy units as power resource for the Chancellor.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers as well as B. Guy Peters and the participants of the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on ‘Political Power in Parliamentary Executives’ for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Although in the British context the term ‘policy unit’ also characterises a particular unit inside the Prime Minister's Office, this article follows one of the longest-serving British Cabinet Secretaries and defines policy units more generally as all ‘units for policy analysis and advice’ (Wilson 2006: 163).