Ministerial advisers and policy-making

Appointed partisan advisers are established and influential policy actors within the executive. Their policy work has long attracted attention with respect to issues of accountability and politicisation. Less attention, however, has been paid to concept and theory building to link empirical findings with extant policy theory. How can we better understand and study the role of partisan ministerial advisers as policy workers? What do they do and how does it ‘fit’ with the broader set of actors and processes central to how policy gets made? This chapter presents careful analysis of the leading conceptual approaches to the study of appointed partisan advisers as policy workers. It offers a critique of these approaches but suggests they share a common logic, and identifies common attributes that can usefully be synthesised into a new framework. A framework is then advanced through the elaboration of four key concepts - buffering, bridging, moving, and shaping - which focus on the substantive and procedural nature of partisan advisers’ policy work. Combined with additional criteria, these are used to develop two subsidiary frameworks focusing on advisers’ policy advisory and policy process participation. As additional study of partisan advisers is undertaken the framework helps clarify the unique and significant contributions that these advisers can make not only in an advisory capacity but also potentially to broader policy process activity.