Abstract
How in their day‐to‐day practices do top public servants straddle the politics–administration dichotomy (PAD), which tells them to serve and yet influence their ministers at the same time? To examine this, we discuss how three informal ‘rules of the game’ govern day‐to‐day political–administrative interactions in the Dutch core executive: mutual respect, discretionary space, and reciprocal loyalty. Drawing from 31 hours of elite‐interviews with one particular (authoritative) top public servant, who served multiple prime ministers, and supplementary interviews with his (former) ministers and co‐workers, we illustrate the top public servants’ craft of responsively and yet astutely straddling the ambiguous boundaries between ‘politics’ and ‘administration’. We argue that if PAD‐driven scholarship on elite administrative work is to remain relevant, it has to come to terms with the boundary‐blurring impacts of temporal interactions, the emergence of ‘hybrid’ ministerial advisers, and the ‘thickening’ of accountability regimes that affects both politicians and public servants.
Highlights
Much of what public administration researchers know about top public servants traditionally comes from institutional analysis (Raadschelders and Van der Meer 2014) and survey research (Hammerschmid et al 2017) shedding light on constitutional and organizational settings, reward structures, as well as demographic features and attitudes
What do they spend their time on and why (Fleming 2008; Van Dorp 2018)? How do they interpret their open-ended job descriptions and enact their roles and responsibilities (Noordegraaf 2000)? How do they exercise influence while at the same time serving political office-holders? How do they deal with professional and ethical dilemmas?. Answering such questions requires more intimate knowledge, for example, from in-depth thematic or case study focused interviewing, diaries, and, ideally, observation. We need this type of research if we are to get any grip on the question how generic institutional norms such as the ‘politics–administration dichotomy’ or container notions such as ‘public service bargains’ (Hood and Lodge 2006) are understood, applied and negotiated by the people performing these roles on a day-to-day basis (Kaufman 1981; Rhodes 2011)
We begin by reviewing the theory and practice of political–administrative interaction We describe our methods, followed by three case studies of one of the Netherlands’ most senior public servants being confronted with challenging situations that defy a ‘business as usual’ approach to navigating the politics–administration dichotomy
Summary
Utrecht University School of Governance, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Funding information Erik-Jan van Dorp’s work on this article was supported financially by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Affairs of the Netherlands.
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