Two of a kind? On the influence of parliamentary and governmental administrations

Abstract

Whether and how bureaucrats are influential actors in policy-making are core questions of Public Administration (PA) research; however, most studies have focused on executive bureaucracies, while their legislative counterparts have received only limited attention. Now that a new research agenda on parliamentary administrations has emerged, this article seeks to bridge the gap between PA and legislative studies to compare and contrast bureaucratic influence in both branches. For this purpose, the article introduces established determinants of influence in the study of governmental administrations and applies them to the legislature. It shows that, based on the dominant configuration of individual, organisational and institutional factors, the likelihood of specific modes of bureaucratic influence is different from governmental administrations. Generally, however, these modes of influence are not exclusive to governments or parliaments but rather contingent on the specific politico-administrative setting, revealing several avenues for future research.