Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Panel: Politico-Administrative Relations in CEE Author(s) Katarina Staronova Comenius University Bratislava Slovakia Rybar Marek, Title Functional or Party Politicisation of Top Civil Servants? Internal and External Recruitment Patterns in Slovak Ministries File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Katarina Staronova Abstract Our previous research has established that it is the individual ministers rather than their parties, who are in charge of patronage appointments into their ministries. These result suggest that it is the professional competencies that individual ministries trust rather then political affiliations that matter in top civil service recruitment. However, in the literature the boundaries between the concepts of party politicization and functional politicization are not always clear (Mayntz and Derlien, 1989). Therefore, in this paper we analyze the ways ministers recruit the new top civil servants, whether they are recruited externally, i.e. from outside the state/ ministerial bureaucracy or whether the incoming ministers tend to promote the existing lower-ranks civil servants. We hypothesize that external recruitment is associated with rent-seeking behavior, while internal recruitment goes hand in hand with policy motivations. In addition, we explore the differences between various types of ministers and their patronage strategies: we expect non-party technocrats to rely on the existing state bureaucracy while professional politicians taping more to the external environment. Finally, we also test these expectations in relations to the level of state bureaucrats to be appointed: upper levels of managerial positions are usually filled with outsiders, regardless of the type of minister, while differences between strategies of appointing ministers are most significant at the lower levels of managerial positions. We hypothesize that the concept presented in this article is suitable not only for measuring party politicization, but also for analytically distinguishing party politicization from functional politicization.
