Conference Agenda

The study of the executive triangle in Bulgaria faces a huge difficulty - the institution of "ministerial advisor" is, on the one hand, not sufficiently regulated, and on the other - not transparent to society. Therefore, the study of the attitudes and assessment of the current administration towards advisors will provide additional information that can „enlighten” the activities of advisors and their influence on the policy process.

At the same time, the issue of the relationship between the two legs of the executive triangle - advisors and the professional administration - is of essential importance for its effective functioning in principle. Representatives of these two groups share the same function - together they are the "operational headquarters" of the minister, regardless of the different methods of selection and career development. In this sense, their attitudes towards each other matter. These attitudes reflect the state of formal institutions, but at the same time they have the significance of an informal institution that influences practices and ultimately - the outcome of the policy process.

Last but not least, the executive triangle, like other institutions related to public governance, is a matter of both formal structure and relationships, values and motivations that reflect the political and administrative culture of both society and the specific individual. This leads to a need to combine institutional analyses with research in the concepts and methods of behavioral science.

This report presents the results of a study of the attitudes of the Bulgarian public administration towards ministerial advisors. It is conducted through an online survey of respondents and aims to identify the relationships between these two groups in the policy process. As a main factor of public administration attitudes towards ministerial advisors, the study uses the value profile of the public servant (Van der Steen, M., Mark JW van Twist, and D. Bressers. "The sedimentation of public values: How a variety of governance perspectives guide the practical actions of civil servants." Review of Public Personnel Administration 38.4 (2018): 387-414.). The main research hypotheses include: The more the public servant approaches the profile of the traditional bureaucrat, as well as the profile of the public manager, the more he has negative attitudes towards ministerial advisors; The importance of the "value profile" factor is influenced by the assessment of the advisors' work: the higher it is, the greater the importance of the value profile.

In the Croatian Public Governance System, behind-the-curtain engaged advisors could be more influential than formally appointed advisors. These kitchen, informal advisors are usually engaged by the Government or even the Prime Minister Office to provide advice in highly complex and sensitive cases.

Although their engagement is in a grey zone, their engagement and / or final products may be used for legitimizing the Government’s decisions and policy measures or for increasing the quality of the Government policies, bills and measures. Some of them find the way to media and are extensively covered and commented in public, while some become publicly known only on the basis of media and civil society research.

After conceptual and methodological parts, we will analyse the Croatian policy advise system and, in addition, three important cases in which the kitchen advisors were used: a) case of changing the general election units’ legislation (2023), b) preparation of the so-called Lex Agrokor (2017), and c) engaging legal advisors in the arbitration cases between Croatia and MOL – Hungarian oil company (2021-2023). Using that empirical basis, along with other accessible information, we will try to speculate about the role, range, sources, and ways of obtaining policy advice at all levels of the Croatian governance system.

During our previous research, we learnt that we cannot rely on official data about policy advice especially in “hot”, i.e. the most publicly sensitive cases. Because data formally do not exist, we are going to reconstruct the picture in these cases by using other methods of collecting data, including “soft” ones, i.e. informal exchange with informed colleagues, following media traces, and others.