Executive Politics at the Top: The Politics-Administration Interface

This panel welcomes research from any part of the world that addresses functions of executive politics at the top levels of national or supra-national political systems, including scholarship on heads of government in presidential and/or parliamentary political systems, executive politicians such as cabinet ministers and any government departments, ministerial bureaucracies or administrative apparatuses that constitute the top level of the executive branch in any given political system. This interface between politics and administration has consistently received high currency in the study of comparative public administration. In particular, the changing patterns of interactions between political executives and career bureaucrats, the role of political advisers or appointees, career paths of political and administrative elites, prevailing role understandings and attitudes of relevant actors, and different ways of organizing executive politics have been recurrent themes of scholarly attention. In view of more recent developments and challenges, this panel is geared to capture issues such as the politicization of senior administrative staff, emerging trends in populist executive politicians, and policy shifts towards programs designed to de-privilege, if not dismantle key principles of merit-based bureaucratic staff organizations.
Against this background, this panel encourages participation from a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and invites research, whether theoretical or empirical in nature, that advances our understanding of top executive politics in modern government systems.