Managerialism and Politicisation in the Dutch Civil Service

Abstract

From the early 1980s on, a series of administrative reforms has been implemented in the Dutch government. Internationally, this trend is known as the New Public Management (NPM) - see e.g. Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004). NPM aims to make governments more efficient, by adopting business-like methods and instruments. These reforms affected personnel policies and instruments, including the appointment system for (top) civil servants and their tenure and salary arrangements. It has been claimed that NPM has led to higher mobility and an increased focus on the managerial skills of public officials. Implicitly, the underlying notion in NPM is that a separation of politics, policy and administration will add to the quality of each of these processes as each actor focuses on what (s)he does best; politicians deal with politics, bureaucrats use their expert knowledge to develop policies, and executive agencies implement those policies in an impartial and professional way. Following this line of reasoning, top civil servants are not only expected to become more managerial but also less political as a result of NPM reforms. However, there are indications that under the influence of NPM reforms (top) civil servants have in fact become more political actors, instead of taking the role of non-political public managers (see e.g., Noordegraaf 2000; Van Thiel et al. 2007).KeywordsCivil ServantParty MembershipPolitical AdvisorSenior Civil ServantPolitical PrincipalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.