Executive politicians at local, sub-national, and national levels all rely upon personal staff for policy advice and administrative support. However, the concept of the "minister’s office” (Halligan, 1995) is described by a plethora of labels across various jurisdictions (Shaw, 2023), which can create confusion and may hinder comparative research efforts. To advance terminological consistency, this article proposes the adoption of a novel, universal term: the Executive Advisory and Support Office (EASO). This designation encompasses both the physical office space and the broader institutional context in which political staff work within executive government structures of the core executive.

The analysis commences with a discussion of how EASOs are considered to be a politicising force within policy advisory systems and the core executive. Next, the paper explores diverse labels employed in European and Westminster model countries. Subsequently, a comparative examination is undertaken, encompassing eight countries and two distinct administrative traditions: Napoleonic (Belgium, France, European Commission, Italy) and Westminster (Australia, Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom). This examination utilises six institutional dimensions to assess the characteristics of EASOs.

The findings reveal significant heterogeneity in the institutional architecture of EASOs, evident not only between the two administrative traditions but also within them. The analysis identifies three distinct “types” of EASOs present across both Westminster and Napoleonic systems: 1) the ministerial cabinet, 2) the Cabinet Westminsteriel, and 3) the Wilsonian office.

We argue that understanding the composition and structure of EASOs is critical, as these entities are posited to be a key politicising force within policy advisory systems. This initial investigation into the typology of EASOs lays the groundwork for further research to determine the precise extent of their influence on policymaking processes.

This paper will present some of the initial findings from the Comparative Political Adviser Survey (COMPAS) for Belgium. COMPAS aims to compare relationships between civil servants, political principals, and political advisers, patterns of politicisation, executive powers across different jurisdictions, and adviser careers. The online survey contains a core of common questions to compare across 17 other COMPAS country participants, as well as a national part with a selection of Belgium-specific questions and a broader range of gender-relevant questions. The intention is that COMPAS can become a repeating survey instrument that facilitates longitudinal research. In addition to this survey, in-depth, semi-structured elite interviews will focus on 60 former political advisers who have worked in several ministries to triangulate and enhance the validity of our inferences, along with prosopographic research techniques to uncover the characteristics of actors who are part of a specific group based on their individual lives and personal trajectories (Delpu 2015). In Belgium, prosopographic research was sporadically conducted from the 1970s to early the 2000s, but mainly focused on Flemish and federal political advisers (Van Hassel 1974; Suetens and Walgrave 1999; Pelgrims 2001). The early research identified some general demographic and background characteristics during the recruitment stage, and subsequently extended to levels of expertise and experience, regional attachment, and family situation, as well as some career pattern analysis of Flemish political advisers. Our updated study includes Francophone political advisers for the first time.

In Austria, as in comparable countries, advising and supporting ministers was traditionally the task of top civil servants. However, shifting reform paradigms and changing political constellations have significantly increased the influence of political appointees such as state secretaries, secretaries general and ministerial officials. Heads of cabinet in particular have increasingly become the ministers' primary point of contact, gradually supplanting top civil servants and thus making the space around the minister a crowded and increasingly contested area - or in the words of Kneucker (2020): much ado around the minister. Despite widespread agreement on the significant influence of ministerial offices (Hartmann 2013; Kneucker 2020) as well as increasing public criticism (see e.g. the Better Administration Initiative / Initative bessere Verwaltung), no formal or informal regulations have yet been permanently established to guide and shape these developments. Moreover, the specific activities of the ministerial offices remain largely hidden from the public, and there is also little information about the training or professional careers of these ministerial advisors publicly available.

Against this background, the proposed contribution aims to describe the entourages of core executives in Austria in as much detail as possible by means of desk research. The guiding questions resemble the CfP, i.e. for example: What is the legal basis for ministerial cabinets and advisors in Austria? What other formal and informal rules and regulations form the framework for their activities? What are the characteristics of the people who carry out these activities in Austria (educational background, professional career …)? How powerful are the actors and why? Can information about processes and procedures be gathered? Which blind spots / lack of data/information can be identified and how can they be addressed in the further analysis? etc. These initial insights into Austria are intended to provide a starting point for a more in-depth analysis and further comparative studies.

References

Hartmann, Klaus. 2013. „Das Personal der Verwaltung“. S. 321–73 in Österreichische Verwaltungslehre, herausgegeben von G. Holzinger, P. Oberndorfer, und B. Raschauer. Wien: Verlag Österreich.

Kneucker, Raoul. 2020. Bürokratische Demokratie, demokratische Bürokratie: ein Kommentar zu Struktur, Gestalt und System der Bürokratie in Europa. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag.

An essential part of the advisory structure around the Government and its ministers is the civil-service.

In a democratic society the public administration is fulfilling an important function by assisting the elected politicians to realise ideas and ambitions in terms of programmes and actions. But the public administration is not just a mechanism for implementing and executing the politicians’ ideas, it is also a separate entity perfectly capable of generating ideas and suggestions as to how the government’s policy should be rethought and changed. In short, the civil service is an organisation designed for policy-making and implementation.

In real life it is always difficult to draw the line between policy-making and implementation, especially today when the bulk of new legislation is ‘framework laws’, leaving plenty of room for manoeuvring in the implementation. Furthermore, several studies in the field of implementation research show how street level bureaucrats in reality become the real policy-makers when rules and regulations have to be adjusted when actually being put to use. However, and this is possibly the most important reason why public administrations are involved in policy-making, the decision-makers (the politicians) need advice on how to execute public programmes and knowledge of what is possible and what is not in a constantly changing society. Party manifestos are rarely concrete and detailed enough to be implemented on the spot when the governing starts.

Due to the need for specialisation and proliferation the public administration is divided into sectors, and at the top in each sector we find a minister (a politician), who is held accountable for the performance of the bureaucracy. But politicians are often strangers in the world of public administration, and it has been said that ministers may come and go while civil servants remain.

As a result, it is possible to analyse the public administration in terms of two different worlds (parts) – and the interaction between them – driven by two types of rationale, the political and the administrative. In the political world, i.e., ministers and other political appointees, actors are driven by ambitions like winning the next election, fulfilling promises given to the electorate and keeping the opposition on the defensive. In the world of non-political civil servants, the focus is on

effectiveness and efficiency in achieving the goals of the government, but also on your career. Often the ambitions of the two worlds coincide but sometimes they collide. It is for example, not unusual for traditional civil servants to complain about the political world when enormous attention is paid to minor or technical details or when it is difficult to have a decision from a minister. The politicians’ favourite complaints regarding the world of civil servants are, on the other hand, that they fight change at any cost or are to slow when implementing policy programmes and decisions made by the politicians.

Research done on the Swedish core executive shows that there is an informal “public service bargain” between the political leadership and top level, non-politically appointed civil-servants, setting the limits for what civil servants can say and do when interacting with ministers. However, the bargain goes both ways – there are things ministers should not do or say if they want to keep the respect and loyalty of their civil servants.

According to this bargain, the main norm for the politicians is to take responsibility for all activities at all time, while the main norm for the civil servants is to give the politicians protection. These two main norms are achieved through a number of more tangible norms for action. In the chapter these norms are discussed and exemplified.

This chapter’s focus is on the meeting place for politicians and administrators in Sweden. It elaborates on how the arena for interaction between the political leadership and its civil-service has been formed and developed over time in Sweden. An important part of that development is that the ministers’ offices have grown slowly but steady, become more and more like the conseillers de cabinet in France and Belgium. There has been an increasing focus on, and influence of, various types of political appointed advisers surrounding the ministers, appointed intuitu personae, based on political trust, and whose engagement terminates with their ministers’ term of office. These growing cabinets has in many ways challenge and changed the traditional structure and the relationship between the ministers and the civil servants – sometimes for the better, but sometimes for the worse.

This working paper aims to enlighten through literary review how the political advisery system is organized in Finland. The paper attempts to answer questions such as what roles the advisers have, and what kind of influence they carry in Finnish politics based on yet unpolished academic results (See Kuoppala 2024). The role of advisers has been studied only in passing in previous literature in English (See Raunio 2021; Pekkola et al. 2023). For the past research, we are able to rely on the previous research written in Finnish or Swedish (Tiihonen, 2006, 2014, 2017; Murto, 2014; Westerlund, 1988, 1990; Ruostetsaari, 2023).