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First provides an overview of the formal structure of the civil service in post‐war Austria and the position of senior officials within it. Includes a discussion of recent changes aimed at making the civil service more flexible and effective and their impact on the top layer of the permanent bureaucracy. The following two main sections look at the incumbents in these positions, and provide information on the demographic and educational background and career patterns (duration in office and inter‐ministerial mobility) of the top civil servants and members of the cabinets ministériels who served in the 1970–1995 period. The next section turns to the political role of senior officials, and the penultimate section discusses the impact of party politics on the civil service. The concluding section summarizes the main points of the chapter.

Dutch society takes pride in its egalitarian character, and political and administrative officeholders are neither separated off nor placed on a pedestal. This general attitude originates in the predominantly middle‐class nature of Dutch society, in which the idea of formal incorporation of top civil servants in a separate class of administrative personnel is foreign; however, at the same time, there is a striving for unity in the national administration. The issue of tension between unity and fragmentation forces an assessment in this chapter of current developments in the higher civil service in comparison with the situation as it existed from the Second World War up to the early 1990s, with the emphasis on developments in the past two decades in which the most important event was the formation of a Senior Public Service (the Algemene Bestuursdienst, or ABD) after 1 July 1995. The first main section of the chapter (section II) examines what is meant by a ‘senior civil service’ in the Dutch context, where even the creation of the ABD does not provide a conclusive answer, since there are many senior civil servants outside it. In order to address this issue, the characteristics of the Dutch personnel management system are examined, and a brief outline given of the ABD and of the number of top civil servants working at central government level in the period 1976–1995. Section III turns to the political–administrative organization and the consultative structures at the top of the central government departments, and discusses the structure of the ABD, while section IV discusses the political affiliation (politicization) of top civil servants, and section V looks at functional mobility at the top, with special attention to the functional motives for creating the ABD. Finally, the social political structure of the civil service is reviewed, with sections on social (VI) and educational (VII) background.

The Danish senior civil service has a mixture of older and newer traditions, in which history and tradition are very important. Accordingly, this chapter starts by summarizing the historical background to the Danish central public administration and the historical role of Danish civil servants. Further sections then introduce the common organizational principles governing the central public administration. The different sections discuss: ranks and numbers of senior civil servants at the top levels; methods of recruitment and promotion; inter‐ministerial mobility; pay; party membership and the senior civil service; the status in the civil service of high status ministries; the social and educational background of top officials; women at the top; interaction and formal contacts within and between ministries; and political party policies towards the senior civil service.

The first part of this chapter discusses retrenchment, recent institutional changes, and senior civil servants in Sweden; it attributes the recent changes in the senior civil service to the budgetary crisis of the state and the emergence of a less interventionalist control regime, in which the heyday of state‐driven economic and social change has gone. The main source of uncertainty now concerns the final destination of the rapid changes in many core aspects of Swedish politics and public administration. The different sections of the chapter look at: the size and structure of the Swedish civil service; ranks of senior civil servants; systems of recruitment and promotion; party membership among senior civil servants; inter‐ministerial mobility of civil servants; status in the civil service; the social and educational backgrounds of top officials; informal contacts across ministries and between ministries and agencies; the relationship between national and sub‐national officials and those working in agencies; political party policies towards the civil service; and the social status of the senior civil service.

This chapter considers an important question in the economics of marriage: whether happy people are more likely to get married, or whether marriage makes people happy and increases their well-being and life satisfaction. Drawing on panel data, it demonstrates that marriage increases happiness, and that happiness decreases over the duration of a marriage but does not decrease to its pre-marital level. The chapter focuses on the significant changes in life satisfaction experienced by the newly married. It shows that couples who differ considerably in relative wage rates benefit more from marriage, in agreement with one of the main predictions in Becker’s theory of marriage based on the gains from specialization. Moreover, couples with similar educational background benefit more from marriage.

This chapter examines the Zhitomir rabbinical school, one of the most controversial institutions in nineteenth-century Jewish life in the tsarist empire. It draws upon the documents of the rabbinical school in the State Archive of the Zhitomir Region. The objective here is to analyse state motivations in creating ‘rabbinical colleges’, the composition and profile of the student body, and the educational backgrounds and goals of its staff and teachers. Here, the internal life of such schools are examined from a new perspective. Indeed, the chapter shows in the case of Zhitomir, that one central reason for the failure of the rabbinical schools lay in the fact that within their walls the self-professed ‘leaders of the Jewish people’ were alienated from the very people they claimed to lead.

This chapter examines the motivations and inspirations behind Frank Sprague's inventions. It provides information on Sprague's family and educational background, and highlights the influence of the Hoosac Tunnel project and the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia on his path to electrical invention as a career and a life's work. The chapter discusses Sprague's apprenticeship with Thomas Edison's company, which provided him opportunities to exercise both his academic training and his engineering skills, and his admission of his desire for the acclaim of heroic invention.

How are the ministerial types operationalized and why? Who are the cabinet ministers under study? What are their professional and political profiles? Chapter 3 addresses all these questions by discussing the coding of left and right ministerial types, and the data collection process. Left-wing ideologues are defined as social democrats and former trade union officials. Left-wing loyalists and partisans are defined as low and high rank social democrats, respectively, with no background as activists in the trade union movement. Right-wing ideologues are defined as liberals or conservatives and former economists, bankers, executives, and businessmen. Right-wing loyalists and partisans are defined as low- and high-rank liberals or conservatives, respectively, with no economics and business background. Important comparisons among the types in terms of their professional, biographical, and political background are provided.