Role Models in the Senior Civil Service: How Tasks Frame the Identification of Senior Bureaucrats with Active and Reactive Roles

Abstract

The influence of senior civil servants' (SCS) tasks on their role perceptions has been widely ignored in the past research on the administrative élite. This paper presents new survey data on SCS in German federal ministries to test this relation by categorizing SCS into three task-related groups: strategists, policy specialists and administrators. Regression analyses reveal that SCS's tasks do not influence their (strong) identification with reactive (supportive) roles but have a significant impact on their identification with active, more politically entrepreneurial roles. This entails two important findings: First, SCS's tasks matter for their appreciation of different roles. Second, active and reactive role models are not irreconcilable (as it is often argued in the literature on bureaucratic politicization), but complementary.

Fancy seeing you here…again: Uncovering individual‐level panel data in repeated cross‐sectional surveys

“…4 For instance, the Public Release data files for the Australian Public Service Employee Census and the Norwegian Administration Surveys do not contain the necessary level of detail in terms of background characteristics, but the original datasets are much richer. The same also holds for the datasets from the German Political-Administrative Elite surveys (Ebinger et al, 2022), large-scale surveys among European Commission staff in 2008, 2014(Kassim et al, 2013Murdoch et al, 2021), as well as numerous surveys fielded internally within ministries, agencies, or other public organizations. As such, the method proposed here has the potential for wide applicability (both by researchers and practitioners within public-sector organizations).…”

“…5 Still, other surveys among public employees take a more general approach. The Norwegian Administration Surveys, for instance, target all ministerial staff with at least 1 year of service (Christensen et al, 2018), while the German Political-Administrative Elite surveys and American State Administrators Project surveys target all employees at the top hierarchical level(s) of the German national and US state-level bureaucracies (Ebinger et al, 2022;Yackee & Yackee, 2021). The Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and UK public service employee censuses as well as the European Commission surveys mentioned above even address all staff members within these respective organizations.…”

It's about time! Temporal dynamics and longitudinal research designs in public administration

“…7 Admittedly, individual-level surveys of the attitudes, views, and experiences of civil servants are conducted in many countries-often capturing the same concepts from one year to the next over long periods of time. Examples include the American State Administrators Project (1964Yackee & Yackee, 2021), US Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (2002-2021Fernandez et al, 2015), Norwegian Administration Surveys (1976Christensen et al, 2018), German Political-Administrative Elite survey (2005-2021Ebinger et al, 2022), and three large-scale surveys among European Commission staff in 2008(Kassim et al, 2013Murdoch et al, 2022). Annual or multi-annual surveys among all civil service staff members have also been conducted in, for instance, Australia (Australian Public Service Employee Census), Canada (Canada Public Service Employee Survey), New Zealand (Te Taunaki Public Service Census), and the UK (UK Civil Service People Survey).…”

Mellem politik og administration: det kommunale topembedsværk

“…Rolleopfattelsen har dermed betydning for, hvorfor topembedsmaend agerer, som de gør (Tajfel, 1982, Egeberg, 1999Simon, 1997;Horton, 2006;Marcussen og Trondal, 2011). Samtidig kan det også give en indsigt i, hvorvidt de opgaver, som udføres, rent faktisk er i overensstemmelse med embedsmaendenes rolleopfattelse (Ebinger, Veit og Strobel, 2021;McDermott et al, 2021).…”