The Bureaucracy and the Policy Agenda

The public administration literature has been dominated by questions about how politicians can control the bureaucracy's application and implementation of laws at the back end of the policy process. Much less scholarly attention is devoted to the influence of the bureaucracy on the content and composition of the policy agenda at the front end of the process. Agenda setting is a fundamental aspect of politics, and this article examines the influence of the bureaucracy on the policy agenda and the conditions for this influence. The core proposition is that the policy agenda is larger and more diverse in political systems in which administrative professionals take up a larger share of the bureaucracy. This effect is expected to be mitigated by the involvement of elected representatives in the policymaking process. The empirical analysis supports these expectations. The findings are based on a time-series cross-section dataset from 98 Danish municipalities over 7 years containing a detailed coding of local council agendas and rich register data.