Personal or Party Roots of Civil Service Patronage? Ministerial Change Effects on the Appointments of Top Civil Servants

• Published date: 01 May 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399720956996
• Author: Marek Rybář,Katarina Staronova
• Date: 01 May 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399720956996

Administration & Society

2021, Vol. 53(5) 651 –679

© The Author(s) 2020

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0095399720956996

journals.sagepub.com/home/aas

Article

Personal or Party

Roots of Civil Service

Patronage? Ministerial

Change Effects on the

Appointments of Top

Civil Servants

Katarina Staronova1 and Marek Rybář2

Abstract

Patronage is typically studied following government terminations when

political parties appoint their nominees into the state administration.

However, patronage is understudied in cases when a change of minister

takes place without government termination. Taking individual government

ministers as the units of analysis, we identify four modalities of ministerial

alterations: replacing, successive, incumbent, and switching ministers.

We show that politicization occurs under “replacing ministers” following

government termination, but the bureaucratic turnover is equally high

under “successive ministers.” That suggests that patronage can be seen as

an individualized power resource of autonomous ministers who exercise

influence independently of their political parties.

Keywords

patronage, political appointments, top executives, political parties, ministerial

alterations

1Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia

2Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Corresponding Author:

Katarína Staronova, Associate Professor, Institute of Public Policy, Faculty of Social and

Economic Sciences, Comenius University, Mlynské Luhy 4, 821 05 Bratislava, Slovakia.

Email: Katarina.Staronova@fses.uniba.sk

956996AASXXX10.1177/0095399720956996Administration & SocietyStaronova and Rybář

research-article2020

652 Administration & Society 53(5)

Introduction

Governing in contemporary democracies is commonly associated with dis-

cretionary appointments of top administrators exercised by politicians in the

executive office. They surround themselves with reliable aides and often staff

the ranks of public service, regulatory bodies, diplomatic service, and other

nonelected positions with their political associates. Although there are differ-

ences across time and space, while in office, politicians enjoying executive

powers at different levels of political systems take advantage of the formal

and informal rights to select their close associates in public administration.

Why are political leaders prepared to engage in this practice? What moti-

vates them, how extensive is its use, and who are the key players involved in

the process? Even though many important scholarly contributions enhance

our understanding of these phenomena, essential questions remain unan-

swered. There are disagreements and conflicting conclusions regarding who

is in charge of the appointments, what the motivations of political leaders are,

as well as methodological puzzles concerning the best approach to measure

the phenomenon. The present contribution seeks to add to the debate by

examining the following questions: In situations where patronage is exten-

sive, is it the individual government ministers or political parties that decide

who is appointed to managerial civil service positions at the ministries?

In comparative literature, the concepts of civil service politicization and

patronage are often used interchangeably. Both are broad terms that cover a

variety of meanings and mechanisms at the political-administrative nexus

(Aberbach et al., 1981; Hood & Lodge, 2006). Politicization is typically

viewed as “the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria”

(Peters & Pierre, 2004, p. 2), mostly in recruitment and promotion. In addi-

tion, politicization takes many other forms, and not all of them require the

replacement of civil servants with the appointees of the incoming political

leaders (Hustedt & Salomonsen, 2014; Peters, 2013). For example, politici-

zation also refers to changing behavior of the civil service, as it is the case in

the so-called functional (Pierre, 2004) and administrative types of politiciza-

tion (Eichbaum & Shaw, 2008).

On the contrary, the study of patronage focuses on party-political appoint-

ments to top civil service ranks and is understood as “the ability of political

parties [emphasis added by the authors] to appoint individuals to (nonelected)

positions” in the public sector (Kopecký et al., 2016, p. 418). This under-

standing is derived from a party politics approach, where patronage is linked

to parties’ clientelistic electoral strategies, chiefly vote-buying, and grass-

roots activism (Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007; Piattoni, 2001). Throughout

this article, we use civil service politicization and patronage interchangeably