During the current debt crisis in Europe a number of unelected ministers have been appointed to government to resolve the economic crisis. Commentators argue that such appointments hurt democracy and are unlikely to succeed. However, appointments of un-elected ministers with policy expertise, defined here as technocrats, are not unique to the current economic crisis. Nonetheless to this day, we have little understanding of the economic impact of unelected ministers. This paper asks the following two questions: when do prime ministers appoint technocrat ministers over partisans? Secondly, are technocrat ministers more or less able than partisan ministers to implement policy reforms? I address these questions with the aid of a new dataset on ministers in fifteen European democracies.The findings of this paper shed light to the complex interdependence of intra-party politics, policy outputs and representation in parliamentary democracies.
