Political Appointments in 18 Democracies, 1975-2007

Abstract

Scholarly literature holds a clear expectation of a growing politicization of the bureaucracy in mature democracies. It is also common for these students to warn against the negative effects produced by merging the roles of politicians and bureaucrats, and it is plausible that a growing politicization of the bureaucracy reduces accountability and thereby increases the risk of bad governance. Exciting analysis is, however, almost exclusively based on single case studies, or few case comparisons. This paper presents results from a new expert survey on political appointments in the executive, covering 18 democracies between 1975 and 2007. By using this data the paper gives a unique description of the number of political appointees in the executive, both between countries and over time. The empirical findings confirm the general expectation of increasing politicization, but also demonstrate different trends in countries belonging to different administrative traditions.