This study explores the career path of administrative state secretaries in German federal ministries. The administrative elite of German federal ministries distinguishes parliamentary and administrative state secretaries. Whereas the former are political agents, administrative state secretaries need to maneuver between the poles of administrative expertise and political loyalty. Even though there is consensus that administrative state secretaries have become more politicized and less bureaucratized in recent years, it is also evident that public management expertise beyond ideological lines becomes vitally more important in policy-making.
This study starts with a quantitative sequence analysis of state secretaries’ biographies in order to classify distinct administrative career types. Sequence analysis is ideally suited to explore this kind of question as it provides a tool for the systematic study of individual career data. Clustering the self-reported biographical sequences of nearly 90 administrative state secretaries from three legislation periods, we identify four prototypical career types: (1) “lateral entrants” became state secretaries after working in the private sector. (2) The “federal career” type experienced longer stops either at the municipal or state government level before entering the federal administration, whereas the (3) “in-house career” type entered the public service directly after graduation and spend virtually all years of their career in the federal ministry where they eventually became administrative state secretaries. (4) The last category consists of individuals combining a mixture of aforementioned characteristics.
In the next step, we explore to which extent these four prototypical career types are determined by political vs. functionalistic factors. The descriptive analysis and estimation results from multinomial regressions indicate that beyond the temporal stability of career types, not just political engagement and administrative expertise but also certain work/life balance motives tend to trigger state secretaries’ career paths which then lead to a particular cluster affiliation.
