The Practice and Politics of Secretary General Appointments
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740231155408 |
| Author | Erik-Jan Van Dorp |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Practice and Politics of Secretary
General Appointments
Erik-Jan Van Dorp
1
Abstract
The question of who is appointed to key administrative posts at the expense of whom lies at the heart of public administration
research. In this paper, I study what career experiences have increased senior civil servants’chances of being appointed to a
secretary general position. The civil service politicization and core executive literatures suggest such appointments are
impacted by loyalty, ability, and proximity to power. These hypotheses are investigated using a mixed methods research design
combining quantitative analysis of the career paths of all active senior civil servants in the years 2000–2020 (n=247) with 22
elite interviews with cabinet ministers and bureaucrats in the Netherlands. The main findings of this paper are that active
affiliation with minister-delivering political parties and having worked in the prime minister’soffice significantly increased
the odds of a candidate’s appointment to an SG position, whereas managerial experience did not. These findings challenge
the conventional theory of nonpoliticized appointments and unlock possibilities for comparative research on bureaucrats’
biographies.
Keywords
secretary general, civil service appointments, politicization, core executive, mixed methods
Introduction
In 1994, the Dutch cabinet decided that the upper echelons of
the civil service would form a general civil service: a pool of
“mobile”civil servants that would rotate across departments.
Traditionally, civil servants would rise through the ranks
within one department; now senior civil servants (SCSs)
were incentivized to move across departments, going from
one domain to another in a “bureaucratic merry-go-round.”
One could work in education policy, before transferring to
economic policy or move up in home affairs. Modeled after
the British civil service, this institutional reform sought to
reaffirm political control of departments, prevent policy
siloes by stimulating cross-pollination, advance the profes-
sionalization of public management, and offer an opportunity
for SCSs to diversify their career paths (Noordegraaf et al.
2020; Steen and Van der Meer 2011). Today, this general
civil service (Dutch: Algemene Bestuursdienst, hereafter:
ABD) has become an institutional fixture within the Dutch
core executive.
Positioned to act as a driver of renewal and professional-
ization of the senior civil service, the Dutch ABD system is
an example of a wider phenomenon. In various countries,
senior executive services were developed with similar strate-
gic goals (Kuperus & Rode, 2016). Centralized executive ser-
vices, in, for example, the United Kingdom, the United
States, and Estonia, are key to senior civil service training
and socialization (Van Wart et al. 2015) and performance
appraisal (Van der Wal, 2017a). Such institutional reforms
can help civil servants to strike a bargain between their par-
tisan and professional leanings, as they bond civil servants
in a professional group with a shared esprit de corps
(Ebinger et al., 2019; Hood and Lodge 2006). Moreover,
and central to the aim of this paper, such executive services
play a critical role in appointing SCSs.
In this paper, I study the career paths of the SCSs that
make up the ABD’s elite cadre: The Top Management
Group. Within this pool, I focus on those individuals who
reach the very top and become a “secretary general”(SG)
in the Dutch system. I map their careers and see if and how
they differ from those elite members who do not. More spe-
cifically, I ask this research question: what career experiences
have increased SCSs’chances of being appointed to a SG
position during 2000–2020?
My approach to answer this question is to study SCSs’
career paths in close detail and to examine if these paths
help to explain who among them gets to be appointed secre-
tary. From those who are appointed from within the ABD
pool, is there a “road much travelled”that sets them apart
from those who do not? Needless to say, appointments are
1
Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
Corresponding Author:
Erik-Jan Van Dorp, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Email: g.h.vandorp@uu.nl
Article
American Review of Public Administration
2023, Vol. 53(5-6) 182–194
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02750740231155408
journals.sagepub.com/home/arp
To continue reading
Request your trial