Political time in public bureaucracies: Explaining variation of structural duration in European governments

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Julia Fleischer,Philippe Bezes,Kutsal Yesilkagit
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13740

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Political time in public bureaucracies: Explaining variation of

structural duration in European governments

Julia Fleischer

1

| Philippe Bezes

2

| Kutsal Yesilkagit

3

1

Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences,

University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

2

Centre for European Studies and Comparative

Politics, Science Po Paris, Paris, France

3

Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs,

Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

Correspondence

Julia Fleischer, University of Potsdam,

Potsdam, Germany.

Email: fleischer@uni-potsdam.de

Funding information

Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Grant/Award

Number: ANR-13-ORAR-0004-01; Deutsche

Forschungsgemeinschaft, Grant/Award Number:

FL 690/3-1; Nederlandse Organisatie voor

Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Grant/Award

Number: 464-13-113

Abstract

Structural duration conveys stability but also resilience in central government and

is therefore a key issue in the debate on the structure and organization of govern-

ment. This paper discusses three core variants of structural duration to study the

explanatory relevance of politics. We compare these durations across ministerial

units in four European democracies (Germany, France, The Netherlands, and

Norway) from 1980 to 2013, totaling over 17,000 units. Our empirical analyses

show that cabinets’ideological turnover and extremism are the most significant

predictors of all variants of duration, whereas polarization in parliament as well as

new prime ministers without office experience yield the predicted significant neg-

ative effects for most models. We discuss these findings and avenues for future

research that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as

well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly.

Evidence for practice

•Researchers argue that structural changes inside government organizations are

shaped by politics that unfold after general elections but also throughout legis-

lative periods.

•This empirical study innovates by assessing structural change explicitly and com-

paring three core variants of structural duration that take the variety of structural

changes into account, over more than three decades and across four European

central governments.

•The findings show the importance of polarization in parliament and cabinets

ideological profiles, which extends our current views focusing on the relevance

of party competition and coalition governance.

INTRODUCTION

Time is essential for studying the structure and organiza-

tion of government, although it is mostly treated as an

implicit aspect of the phenomenon. Early studies started

off with analyzing patterns of structural change in gov-

ernment over time, identifying distinct periods of stronger

and weaker structural change. They described these lon-

gitudinal swings as “moods of integration,”during which

governments regard the public sector as a whole, versus

“moods of diversity,”when new types of organizational

entities are established and comprehensive administra-

tive reform efforts are made (Hood, 1973,1978;

Jacobson, 1964; Wettenhall, 1968; Willson, 1955). Later,

scholars addressed time by studying structural duration,

arguing that government structures are “immortal”

(Kaufman, 1976). Empirical research revisiting this claim,

however, showed how the definition and assessment of

termination shapes the findings on the duration of gov-

ernment structures and hence, government structures are

terminated more regularly than suggested (Boin

et al., 2010; Greasley & Hanretty, 2016; Hardiman &

MacCarthaigh, 2017; Holmgren, 2018; Kuipers et al., 2018;

Lewis, 2002,2003; Yesilkagit & Christensen, 2009; see also

Lim, 2021). These scholars reiterated the importance of

administrative reforms based on governments’agendas

Received: 15 January 2023 Revised: 26 August 2023 Accepted: 29 September 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13740

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:1813–1832. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar 1813

(e.g., Bertelli & Andrew Sinclair, 2015,2018;James,2003;

James et al., 2016; cf. Talbot & Johnson, 2007;seealsoMor-

tensen & Green-Pedersen, 2015). They also highlighted the

relevance of political determinants (Götz et al., 2018;

Pollitt, 1984;Ryuetal.,2020; Sieberer et al., 2019). More

recently, scholars turned toward the change of formal struc-

tures inside ministerial departments and demonstrated that

such political determinants also matter for these levels of

government organizations (Fleischer et al., 2023;Kuipers

et al., 2021; Yesilkagit et al., 2022).

In addition, the scholarly debate on structural change

in government made several methodological advance-

ments in assessing structures and structural change.

When organizational studies deemed their measures as

unfit for government organizations as these organizations

were regarded as too homogenous (Pugh et al., 1963;

Pugh & Hinings, 1976), public administration scholars

introduced alternative “bureaumetric”measures to study

formal structures in government (Hood et al., 1981). Other

scholars established a typology of structural change of

these organizations (Roness, 1979,1982,1992; cf. Rolland

et al., 1998; Rolland & Roness, 2011; cf. MacCarthaigh &

Roness, 2012). Lately, this has been further advanced into

a novel typology of structural transitions, to allow more

flexible empirical research into when and how govern-

ment structures change (Carroll et al., 2020). As the field

also moved toward cross-country comparisons, the array

of political determinants studied is ever growing, while

the core research interest—the duration of government

structures—largely remained the same, although with

some variation on how to define and determine termina-

tion (see Kuipers et al., 2018). This may be partly related

to empirical methods, particularly event-history analyses,

that are widely employed to establish causal relations on

when government structures change. Some research also

takes stronger into account how they change and thus

examines the competing risks of different types of struc-

tural change (Yesilkagit, 2020).

Our paper follows up on this debate and studies the

implications of various definitions and measurements of

structural duration in government, thereby providing

more nuance to both when and how government struc-

tures change. We aim to analyze how politics matters for

different variants of structural duration and thereby also

shed light into a methodological aspect of the scholarly

debate that is oftentimes neglected, namely whether

structural change is assessed explicitly or rather attributed

by proxy. Building upon existing work, we ascertain

whether the polarization in parliament as well as the

short- and long-term ideological turnover in cabinets and

new prime ministers’office experience matter for either

variant of duration.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows.

We first introduce the key theoretical arguments explain-

ing how political determinants shape the structural dura-

tion in government organizations. Subsequently, we

present our data and method, starting with a brief

description of key methodological advancements in the

empirical research on the structure and organization of

government. Our data combines the SOG-PRO dataset (for

France, Germany, and the Netherlands) and a recoded

version of the NSAD dataset for Norway and thus reports

on structural change inside the ministerial departments

of these four countries from 1980 to 2013.

1

For our empir-

ical analyses, we employ Cox mixed effects models to

show that political determinants influence structural dura-

tion inside ministerial departments and therefore matter

beyond the reallocation and redesign of ministerial port-

folios after general elections. Furthermore, our explicit

assessment of different types of structural durations

based on different structural transitions allows to reflect

upon why political determinants yield different levels of

explanatory relevance. Put differently, empirical research

into structural change in government needs stronger

attention for its underlying definitions of change and its

measures—and benefits from an explicit assessment

rather than implicit attributions. Hence, we conclude with

a discussion on avenues for future and more time-

sensitive research in the scholarly debate on the structure

and organization of government.

THEORIZING THE DURATION OF

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES IN

GOVERNMENT

The duration of government structures is a prevalent

theme in the wider scholarly debate on the structure and

organization of government. Whereas many scholars have

put attention to explanations for the timing of structural

change, thus establishing when government structures

change to ascertain duration, a growing strand of the

debate is more explicitly interested in how government

structures change, thus highlighting the various mean-

ings of termination (Kuipers et al., 2018; cf. Adam

et al., 2007). According to Kuipers et al. (2018), two major

views on termination can be distinguished in the existing

literature, a political control view that acknowledges a vari-

ety of types of structural changes that dissolve structures

in government in different ways and an institutional leg-

acy view that follows a dichotomous understanding of ter-

mination and regards only a full dissolution of

government structures as termination. Whereas the politi-

cal control view emphasizes how structural changes

express explicit political choices aiming to control the

public sector, the institutional legacy view stresses

bureaucratic agency and regards only the birth and death

of a public sector organization as strong political choices,

whereas the plethora of other structural changes occur-

ring throughout its lifetime are mere adaptations, also

upon its own initiative, in order to survive (cf. Dommett &

Skelcher, 2014).

However, we also aim to theorize further why

and how politics may shape termination differently.

1814 POLITICAL TIME IN PUBLIC BUREAUCRACIES