Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Main Theme Author(s) Ringa Raudla Tallinn University of Technology Tallinn Estonia Douglas James, Windett Jason, Title Financial Bureaucrats of Europe: Comparative Analysis of their Attitudes towards Policy-making File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Ringa Raudla Abstract The broader goal of the paper is to explore one of the core questions in comparative research on public policy and administration: What is more important in influencing public officials’ attitudes towards policy-making − the distinctive administrative style of the country or the specific features of a policy sector? We are particularly interested in the attitudes of the public officials working in the field of finance regarding their policy-making roles. The growing importance of the financial dimension in governance gives financial bureaucrats a large role in the governmental ecosystem. In light of their growing importance, it is somewhat curious that financial bureaucrats have received only limited attention in scholarly research so far. Our paper brings together, theoretically and empirically, two streams of literature in public administration and public policy: the literature that analyses the role of civil servants in policy-making and the literature that discusses the influence of administrative traditions vs sectoral characteristics on the attitudes of civil servants towards policy-making. We zoom in on two questions: 1) Do the perceptions of financial officials regarding their responsibilities and roles in policy-making differ systematically from the perceptions of non-finance managers, and 2) Are finance officials influenced more by their professional group or by the administrative context in which they work? In the theoretical part, we first discuss how, in the context of European countries, the administrative traditions are likely to influence civil servants’ attitudes towards policy-making and then develop hypotheses proposing that financial officials are likely to have more active stance towards policy-making, more policy autonomy and more technocratic attitude towards policy-making than officials from other sectors. In the empirical part, we test these hypotheses, using a survey of senior government officials in 19 European countries (7077 respondents), undertaken within the framework of the Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future (COCOPS) project – the largest comparative public management project undertaken in Europe to date. Overall, our results indicate that the national administrative traditions play a stronger role in influencing the policy-making attitudes of officials than their specific sector.
