Introduction

The relationship between civil servants and politics is a delicate one (weber 1922), and it is well known that the formal dichotomy between the political and administrative branch is to a certain extent artificial. While some early thinkers about bureaucracy – such as wilson in the late 1880s – departed from the assumption that ‘politics’ could be clearly distinguished from ‘administration’ (wilson 1887), later scholars argued that reality was more complex. They emphasised that in day-to-day policymaking civil servants are under continuous political pressure and that politics also plays an important role at the administrative level (long 1949; simon et al 1950). In the early 1970s scholars of bureaucratic politics developed an explicit ‘bureaucratic’ politics interpretation of policymaking (allison 1971).1keywordscivil servanteuropean parliamentsocial politicisationparliamentary democracyministerial cabinetthese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.