Chris Eichbaum

Minding the minister? Ministerial advisers in New Zealand government

Abstract In recent years, political advisers have been in the spotlight in a number of Westminster nations. A surprising feature of the literature, however, is the relative lack of empirical attention paid to advisers themselves. Moreover, researchers have tended to focus on the accountability issues raised by the conduct of political staff at the expense of other significant matters, including advisers’ views of their influence on the policy process and on relations between ministers and public servants. This article seeks to redress those gaps. Drawing on data from a survey of New Zealands ministerial advisers, it describes the activities advisers engage in, and sets out advisers’ views on their contribution to the policy process, their bearing on relationships between ministers and officials, and the state of their own relations with public servants. It concludes that the ministerial advisers role in the executive branch of New Zealand government is more varied and comprehensive than is frequently assumed.

Following the Yellow Brick Road: Theorizing the Third Element in Executive Government

Political advisers—as a relatively new actor in executive government—are attracting increasing scholarly attention. The dominant orientation to date has been empirical, and there is a strong case for a more explicitly theoretical turn in the study of political advisers. The purpose of this article is to sketch a series of settings in which theorizing might fruitfully be pursued. The article seeks to locate the existing empirical work in the contexts set by four dominant narratives in political science and public policy.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road: New Directions in Studying Political Advisers in Executive Government

Once upon a time they may have lived in the dark (Blick, 2004), but in recent years a good deal of academic light has been thrown on political advisers—variously described as special advisers, ministerial advisers, or exempt staff. The first generation of this scholarship has two signal characteristics. First, with few exceptions, it is pointedly empirical in nature. Two issues, in particular, have dominated: the impact of the partisans on relations between political executives and senior civil (or public) servants and the nature and efficacy (or otherwise) of the accountability arrangements applying to political staff. Second, much (although, clearly, far from all) of this work is grounded in the particulars of members of the Westminster community of nations, several of which— the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in particular—have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention.1 What is required, then, is an acceleration of a second wave of research into political advisers. There are several trajectories this next generation of scholarship might take. Empirically, there is much we still do not know regarding the contribution political advisers make to the procedural and substantive dimensions of public policymaking. Furthermore, while the empirical foundations of the

Enemy or ally? Senior officials' perceptions of ministerial advisers before and after MMP

There is now a well-established literature on the various second-order effects of the adoption of proportional representation in New Zealand. One feature of the contemporary executive landscape, however, remains substantially under-researched. This article reports on research regarding ministerial advisers in New Zealand Cabinet ministers’ offices. More specifically, it compares senior public servants’ current attitudes towards ministerial advisers with pre-MMP speculation regarding the possible future influence of such advisers. The article concludes that while there are concerns about the possible long-term influence of political advisers, for the majority of senior officials working relationships with ministerial advisers are positive and productive.

Book Review: Oliver Schmidtke (ed.), The Third Way Transformation of Social Democracy: Normative Claims and Policy Initiatives in the 21st Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 262, cloth UK £45.00

the critical differences among accountability regimes applying in the public, corporate and voluntary sectors, and how these regimes are based on and have to confront differing problems of public scrutiny, discussion, information flows and operational incentives. In his view, the assumption that the state is the only institution directly threatening the rights and freedoms of citizens is ’dangerously mistaken’, and that in an age of global capitalism, ‘[i] mproving the public accountability of private organisations