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Governments often reallocate administrative units among ministries to meet parties’ office and policy demands or to increase political control over the bureaucracy. How do such reforms affect the work motivation and performance of ministerial bureaucrats? Based on self-determination theory, this paper expects detrimental effects on bureaucrats’ ability to meet the basic psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, which should reduce work motivation. This negative effect should be weaker when bureaucrats perceive a substantive rationale and long-term benefits of the reform compared to changes perceived as driven solely by party-political goals. We find support for these expectations in interviews with top-level ministerial bureaucrats in Germany working in two policy areas (public construction and consumer protection) that were frequently reallocated between ministries. The study shows that organizational change also affects work motivation among top-level bureaucrats and has broader implications for understanding civil servants’ motivations and performance as well as unintended consequences of public sector reforms.

In multiparty governments, policymaking is a collaborative effort among the different incumbent parties. Often hidden by public debates about broader government policy, the necessary coordination routinely happens at the ministerial level, where ministries of different parties jointly devise viable and equitable policy solutions. However, since coordination involves substantial transaction costs, governments must carefully gauge the potential benefits. We study the political rationales that motivate governments to make this investment. We argue that coordination during the process of ministerial policy design hinges on both a conducive ministerial structure and sufficient authority. Once these conditions are met, cross‐party coordination is more likely in policy areas where the implementation of government policy cannot be taken for granted. We investigate these claims, drawing on two new datasets. The first contains information about ministerial collaborations on all legislative projects sponsored by German governments, while the second maps the distribution of policy responsibilities among German ministries from 1976 until 2013, based on data about the policy briefs of all individual working units within the top‐level federal executive. Given that ministries imprint their own perspective on legislation, our results are beyond administrative pedantries, but have substantial implications for the type and content of policies coalition governments formulate.

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