Of ideal-types and images: advisers and political-administrative relations

From ‘images’ to ‘bargains’, the heuristic tools employed by academics to make sense of political-administrative relations (PARs) are numerous. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about ministerial advisers. In an attempt to bridge this theoretical lacuna, in this chapter we present seminal PAR theoretical frameworks and examine the extent to which they anticipate(d) and/or accommodate(d) the ministerial adviser. We identify two distinct scholarly waves, in the first of which the PAR literature foresaw a potential merger between politics and administration before, in the second, grounding itself in the stance that a merger between the two had taken place. Within both, the adviser can be perceived but is not yet clearly drawn. Finally, we reflect on the role of subjectivity in the creation and use of ideal-typical heuristics, and on how these can theoretically position the ministerial adviser in future research.