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Policy advice is usually studied as part of the policy process, while the organization and control of public bureaucracy remain central concerns of public administration. Yet the two are closely connected. Political executives do not simply receive policy advice. They also shape who is able to provide it, the institutional position of advisers, the resources available to them and, ultimately, the conditions under which expertise enters policy design and implementation.
This panel examines policy advisory systems at this intersection between public policy and public administration. Its starting point is that relations between political executives, bureaucrats and other policy experts are embedded in broader structures of government and in formal and informal institutions. These arrangements may support professional autonomy and the provision of evidence-informed advice. They may also enable political executives to politicize advisory institutions, restrict access to decision-making, marginalize competing expertise or turn advisers into instruments of political control and legitimation.
The panel asks how different political and administrative settings shape these executive–expert relations and with what consequences for policymaking and administration. Of particular interest is variation across regime types, policy sectors and time. Even highly centralized or authoritarian political systems need expertise to address complex policy problems. Political control and policy rationalization may therefore coexist, while their relative importance can change as political incentives, institutional arrangements and policy problems change.
Papers may address relations between political executives and career bureaucrats, political appointees and external advisers; the politicization or professionalization of expertise; centralization and fragmentation of advisory arrangements; bureaucratic autonomy and resistance; and the consequences of these processes for policy capacity, implementation and government performance.
Rather than treating policy advisory systems as a separate field of policy-process research, the panel places them within the study of the structure and organization of government. In doing so, it seeks to bring public policy and public administration scholarship into closer conversation by examining how the organization of executive–administrative relations shapes both the advice governments receive and the policies they are able to formulate and implement.