Politicization of the Bureaucracy across and within Administrative Traditions

ABSTRACT

It is frequently claimed within the politicization literature that while governments around the world are increasingly politicizing senior public service appointments, the nature and extent of this politicization varies across administrative traditions. To date, however, differences across administrative traditions have received little empirical scrutiny; research tends to be more comparable than comparative. Using data from an expert survey systematically measuring the merit-, political-, and personal-recruitment of senior public servants in 20 countries, this article examines differences across and within the Nordic, Westminster, Germanic and Napoleonic administrative traditions, in addition to the alternative Anglo-American and Southern European traditions. Various tests show meaningful variation in politicization across administrative traditions, with the starkest differences found between the Nordic and Napoleonic traditions. The results also show less variation among the countries comprising the Nordic tradition than that found within the other traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Administrative tradition
• bureaucracy
• politicization
• quality of government
• comparative public administration
• patronage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).