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The aim is to describe the current senior civil service in Britain; in order to do this, recent changes instigated by the Thatcher and Major governments have to be addressed. To explain these developments, four analytical themes are used that run through the different reforms of the senior civil service that are to be discussed. These themes are managerialism (private‐sector management styles in the civil service), marketization (introducing markets into civil service operations), agencification (‘hiving off’ civil service functions to separate agencies), and politicization (breaking down the barriers between political and non‐partisan tasks in government). The introduction to the chapter characterizes these four themes. The second section defines the British senior civil service, and further sections assess change through various aspects of the senior civil service: recruitment and promotion; mobility; sociological characteristics of senior officials; and the relationship with the political machinery of government.

In France, the notion of a senior civil servant is a social rather than a legal one, and senior civil servants may be defined through their role as privileged partners of political power and participation in government decision‐making; they are a heterogeneous group of senior managers of the state public administration, whose members share neither the same careers nor prestige nor professional culture, and regard themselves generally as intellectuals rather than as managers. The relationship between senior civil servants and politicians is more ambiguous and closer in the 1990s than it was during the 1960s, and the politicization of the senior civil service has been considerably strengthened, but senior civil servants still consider themselves as representing the permanence of the state, and are still reluctant to talk freely about their political involvements. Whatever the social changes that have occurred during the last 15 years and whatever the political changes, the senior civil service remains strong. An overview of the higher French civil service has to take into account three variables that interact simultaneously: the fundamentally individualistic culture acquired during years of professional training; the decisive role of the grand corps in the career path and in the representation of what is ‘good administrative work’; and the privileged social rank of the higher civil service. This chapter presents the main characteristics of senior public managers in France by trying to highlight signs of an evolution since the 1960s; the different sections look at recruitment and promotion methods, the political activity and mobility of senior civil servants, the internal hierarchy of the civil service, the sociological characteristics of senior public managers, the professional relationships of senior civil servants, the absence of any higher civil service policy, and the debated question of the erosion of higher civil service social status.

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.

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 Belgian senior civil service is in transition, with external pressures clearly pushing the government firmly towards a reform agenda and improving public confidence in the administrative system, in terms of democracy and accountability and of economy and efficiency. In addition, budgetary pressures have combined with political will to ensure that the operation of the administration complies with the new managerialist paradigm. This chapter gives an overview of the position of senior civil servants in the Belgian federal ministries (the federal civil service). It consists of three main sections: the first describes the coexistence of two opposing civil service models, a formal bureaucratic one and an informal politicized one, and assesses the implications of the clash between these models for the position (job definition, classification, and security; the career ladder; salaries; political appointments; and ministerial cabinets) and role conceptions of top civil servants; the second addresses the issue of representativeness of the senior civil service in terms of education, language, and gender; the third deals with the two major challenges to the Belgian senior civil service (external pressure and internal constraints) and the resulting structural reform agenda.

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.

This account of institutional change and positional differentiation of senior officials in Germany's Federal administration is presented in five sections. Section I, ‘Senior Officials and the Reassertion of Political Authority’, is introductory and discusses the causes and implications of change in the organization and in the political and administrative roles of the senior civil service; changes identified include party politicization, parliamentarization and federalization of the national policy process, modernization initiatives, European integration, and unification. Section II gives a brief survey of the Federal senior ministerial personnel (looking at pay grade and rank, and centrality), and section III considers paths to the top, paying particular attention to the procedures for recruitment and promotion and the consequences of weak formal structures for personnel planning and development. Following on from the definition of political craft as a defining attribute of effective top officials, section IV highlights the central position of political coordination units as training grounds in the Federal administration and comments on the informal positional differentiation that they encourage. The discussion concludes in section V with an assessment of the implications of the partition of the ministerial bureaucracy between Bonn and Berlin.

The beginning of the twentieth century saw a progressive southernization of jobs in the Italian public sector, with a sizeable migration of personnel from South to North. In 1995, some 35% of civil servants worked in the North and 65% in the Centre‐South, but 27% of civil servants in the North were from the Centre‐South, which, in this way, contributed to the administration and the provision of public services in the North; in the top echelons of the state administration, the disequilibrium was even stronger. State employees in general, therefore, and senior officials, in particular, are not representative in territorial terms, resulting in the paradox of a senior civil service that administers the nation, but which is not national. This chapter aims to illustrate this paradox. It looks first at the subject to be analysed (the senior civil service) and its organizational context, and then defines a profile of senior officials, illustrating the characteristics of the category in which they are found; finally it analyses the two (failed) attempts of reform.

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 conclusion starts by noting that there are clearly highly diverse trends in the development of bureaucracy in Western Europe, and that, although in some countries patterns of change are quite distinct, change does not appear to have followed any one expected pattern or scale. It then looks at two central questions for the role of bureaucracy: its political controllability and efficiency. These enable us to point to differences in broad underlying principles that reflect how different countries have traditionally understood and dealt with these two central problems, allow us to make important distinctions between different forms of bureaucracies, and explore the causes and character of changes in the senior ranks of post‐war bureaucracies. The two central questions are then examined in sections on political control, performance, managerial changes, and changes in political control. The concluding section finds that there is a common theme underlying the development of relationships between bureaucratic and political elites that applies to most of the country studies: a deinstitutionalization or personalization of political trust. Understood as a question of trust, change in bureaucracy is linked to much wider political changes that have been identified outside the literature on bureaucracy.