Against Privilege: Exploring the Diversity of Background, Motivation and Beliefs in Public Administration – the Case of the EU Administration

This paper addresses an important weakness in the literature on public administration. Although hierarchy and stratification are central to the very definition of public bureaucracy, vertical differences are frequently overlooked in the study and analysis of staff backgrounds, motivations and beliefs, and findings based on a single strata or segment of staff are invariably presented as if the features in question were representative of the entire organization. Since political scientists are routinely attracted to top officeholders, they typically privilege the experience of senior civil servants, policy officers, and/or permanent officials. Following a quite different research design, this paper challenges this tendency. Drawing on an analysis of responses to large-scale surveys of the European Commission (n=5545) and the Council Secretariat (n=1356), it compares the backgrounds, motivations and beliefs of staff from all categories and at all levels of the two organizations. It finds significant variation along these dimensions between managers and other employees, between policy officers and other staff categories, and between men and women. In particular, since managers have frequently been the focus of studies of the European Commission, it shows that managers have distinctly different views on a broad range of issues, even when compared to colleagues within the same staff category of administrators (ADs), i.e. policy officers. The paper makes three contentions: first, that similarity of background or outlook cannot be assumed across the organization; second that caution needs to be exercised where generalizations about an organization are based on narrow, unrepresentative samples; and third, that research programmes directed towards a single staff strata or segment imposes important restrictions on the research questions that can be answered or addressed. More broadly, it argues that the alternative approach that it exemplifies has important policy-making, as well as intellectual, consequences.