He Who Appoints the Piper: Understanding Reasons and Implications of Agency Management “Politicisation” in Slovakia

Discussion of politico-administrative relations as well as the research on agencies generally treats the “politicisation” of agency management as a single, “black-box” concept, according to which agency managements (and other senior civil servants) are either political or not. Our paper shows that, using a strict, but widely applied definition of what constitutes a political appointment, agency heads in Slovakia are overwhelmingly “political”, but that the implications of politicisation vary, depending on the type of politicisation. In particular, we distinguish personal nominations of the responsible minister and contrast them with party nominations based on coalition agreements. Based on a series of interviews with senior policy-makers on both sides of the politico-administrative divide, we show that the selection mechanism, incentive structure and robustness of actual accountability mechanisms differs more between these two types of politicisations than between the ministerial and formally “non-political” appointment.