Top civil servants in Europe have traditionally been counted among the most powerful of political elites (Armstrong 1973). Whether they served democratically elected politicians, monarchs or unelected military or party regimes, top bureaucrats in most countries either held the levers of power or worked closely with those who held them. In part the powerful position might have resulted from the high social status of senior officials. The upper reaches of the bureaucracy had tended to attract the sons of the petty nobility and higher bourgeoisie since at least the eighteenth century and continued to do so well into the twentieth. In part the power might result from sharing a common outlook on how societies would be governed, thus providing, in elite theory terms, a cohesive governing elite. Moreover, in many cases they shared this outlook with their political masters (Armstrong 1973; Kingsley 1944). Our previous volume in this project (Page and Wright 1999) examined the changing patterns of recruitment and the sociological character of the civil services of western Europe. This book examines changes in a third basis of the political power of bureaucratic elites: their strategic position within the state apparatus.KeywordsCivil ServantPolicy AdviceSenior OfficialPublic GovernancePolitical AdviserThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

It is a common enough conclusion to a comparative study of trends in almost any political phenomenon to point to the argument that the countries being compared all had different starting points and thus either developed at different paces or even along different lines. We have a huge variety of starting points. While Wolfgang Müller shows that the Austrian bureaucracy cannot be properly understood without looking at the legacy from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the interwar years, if we take the immediate post-war period as our starting point we have countries that start with once powerful bureaucracies that ran empires, bureaucracies of countries that suffered military defeat, bureaucracies that operated under conditions of extreme executive instability and those that were part of an authoritarian state structure. There are bureaucracies were at the time strong and have remained so, some that were weak and remained so, and some that have moved from stronger to weaker and from weaker to stronger. The term 'path dependence' might have been invented precisely to cover conclusions such as this. Such observations of extreme diversity do not, of course, let one off the hook concerning whether the comparative exercise was worth doing in the first place if the conclusion was so predictable. Moreover these observations do not answer the question of what a comparative study does for us if patterns of political change are so variable if not indeterminate.