COORDINATION

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has considerable expertise to evaluate the policy content of ministerial proposals, and indeed that is one of its main functions.

Draft bills are vetted primarily by the Privy Council Office and to a lesser extent by Finance Canada and the Treasury Board. These central agencies are prestigious places to work, and indeed, central agency experience is highly valued (some even say a prerequisite) for advancement within the federal public service. Consequently, central agency staff members are generally of high quality and possess the comprehensive sectoral policy expertise needed for the regular and independent evaluation of draft bills, based on the government’s strategic and budgetary priorities.

The president’s advisory ministry (Segpres) has at its disposal the necessary instruments and capacities to monitor and evaluate the policy content of line ministry proposals. Nevertheless, channels of evaluation and advice are not fully institutionalized, and may change with a new head of state.

Being a ministry by itself, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) certainly has an evaluation capacity. The decree on the PMO from 2003 enumerates 26 task areas, several of which indicate this capacity. Among these are the coordination of the work of government and parliament, the management and monitoring of the cabinet program, the preparation of general guidelines of Finnish EU policy and the preparation and handling of issues relating to the European Union in the ministries, the preparation of reports on measures taken by government, the coordination of communications from the government and the various ministries, the planning of future-oriented social policies, the promoting of cooperation between government and the various branches of public administration, and so on. The PMO has a secretary of state, an undersecretary of state and is well-staffed with several departments for the managing of specified tasks.

The Office of the Prime Minister has a small to medium-sized staff of 30 to 50 people, about 10 of which are political advisers, with the rest being professional bureaucrats. The office is not intended to evaluate policy proposals in detail but to coordinate and oversee that government policies are roughly aligned and that policy planning is adequate and follows prescribed procedures. It has sufficient expertise and capacity for its purpose and is considered to be an “elite” department with a set of gifted employees. A special minister was appointed in 2009 to further increase the coordination capacity in the government.

The Cabinet Office is in effect the central coordinating agency in government. It has high-quality civil servants who are responsible for different policy areas and support cabinet committees. Closer to the prime minister is the prime minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU), which besides thinking about long-term issues, has also become involved in policy work. It is the tool of choice to “provide policy advice in accordance with the prime minister’s policy priorities,” as the first of its three functions states. The Number 10 Policy Unit evaluates ministerial draft bills and deals with the more day-to-day issues in coordinating policy. It is mainly staffed by policy experts drawn from outside government, but also includes some civil servants.

Special advisers appointed by ministers but paid from public funds fulfill a more political function. Although their role sometimes causes conflict with that of civil servants, they can often help (notably in working with ministerial private offices) in striking deals and coordinating strategy. Their capacity to do so often depends on the skill of the individuals and the standing of their ministers as much as their formal positions.

The closest analogue to a GO or PMO in the U.S. system is the White House Staff. It has vastly extensive resources for assessing and developing legislation – including separate, large staffs for economic policy, foreign and national security policy, and domestic policy. The White House (or the White House Staff, provided it has presidential support) not only has the expertise and authority to return or reject cabinet proposals, but it is itself frequently the source of major policy proposals, with departments and agencies playing only an auxiliary role. The White House is essentially sovereign vis-a-vis the line agencies. It decides how much participation to permit the line agencies, and has generally dominated policy-making on major issues in recent years. In some cases, however, the executive leadership may deliberately decide to leave the formulation of policy to a department or interdepartmental committee, as in the case of the reform of the financial sector, because of the complexity of the issue. In this case, the Treasury Department played a prominent role. On complex legislation, because specific provisions are negotiated within Congress, effective White House influence requires leading or at least overseeing the negotiations between the executive branch, the key congressional committees, and the party leaders in Congress. Obama has been largely successful in this. In the enormously complex economic stimulus, health care, and financial reform negotiations, executive branch negotiators were consistently reasonably attuned to the president’s priorities.

The hierarchical organization of government gives the prime minister the possibility of modifying draft bills from ministers. In important cases, or even continuously, as is the case under President Nicolas Sarkozy, this steering function is situated in the President’s Office.
The prime minster appoints advisors from all ministries as policy advisors in a given sector. All ministerial domains are covered. For the time of their appointment these civil servants are accountable to the prime minister. With a smaller but powerful team, the President’s Office does the same. Several hundreds of people are involved in the steering, checking, controlling and advising functions. However, quite often, the issues at stake are not technical but of a political/corporatist nature. Sometimes conflicts are triggered by substantive issues but in many instances the crucial questions are related to the division of competences and power. The Ministry of Finance is a crucial player as it gives its very powerful opinion on every matter under discussion. The main but limited exception to that Prime Minister’s Office‘s influence is found when influential leaders of minority parties of the coalition can use their political leverage. Another exception is related to the close relationship that a minister might have with the president. In that situation, in case of conflict between the Prime Minister’s Office and a line minister, a kind of appeal procedure to the president puts the prime minister in an awkward position as the president might choose to support the line minister‘s view over the prime minister’s opinion.

The expert staff of the Prime Minister’s Office consists of two lawyers, one consultant on foreign policy and two other persons labeled as experts. This office has the smallest number of staff members of all the ministries in the Icelandic government, but has been considered to have the expertise it needs to evaluate ministerial draft bills thoroughly. At the time of writing, the current coalition government of the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left Green Movement had plans to merge ministries, reducing their number from 12 to nine. One of the main arguments for this plan was that some ministries lacked broad-based expertise, and merging them would render this expertise better accessible to them all.

Under the central government reform implemented by the Koizumi government in 2001, the role of central institutions was considerably strengthened. While retaining and making use of the substantially beefed-up resources of the Cabinet Secretariat, the new DPJ-led government has put particular emphasis on transferring effective control over the budget from the Ministry of Finance to the newly established National Strategy Office (NSO), chaired by the prime minister and led by a minister of state (first Naoto Kan, then Yukio Edano). On a symbolic level and perhaps in the future also on a material level, the NSO embodies the principle of prime ministerial leadership (Takayasu 2009). It is tasked with (politically) determining priorities, including budget priorities; acting as a think tank within the core executive, by collecting and disseminating ideas, and making numerous hitherto existing councils redundant; providing political council to the prime minister, who has to date often relied on the chief cabinet secretary for this function; and fostering information flow within cabinet.

The NSO experienced a bumpy start in 2009: In setting up the first (supplementary) budget, the division of labor between the (then)-National Strategy Office and the Ministry of Finance remained somewhat vague.

Under President Calderón, the technical capacity of the top presidential officials has been high, and they are well capable of evaluating legislation. The presidential office is expected to work closely with line ministries. There were some tensions in the previous Fox administration, due to the rather political nature of the presidential office (where the president’s wife also worked). Due to the absence of a high-level career civil service, both the cabinet and the presidential office are staffed with presidential appointments. As a result, the capacity of presidential governance rather depends on the president concerned, and nothing categorical can be assumed about this from the formal rules of government.

The Tusk government has strengthened the sectoral policy expertise of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister. The newly created Council of Ministers Committee Department of the Chancellery evaluates the content of government documents submitted to cabinet meetings.

South Korea’s presidential system has a dual executive structure, with the president serving both as head of state and head of government. The prime minister is clearly subordinate to the president and is not accountable to parliament. Political tradition, constitutional rules, the government’s organizational structure and the de facto distribution of political power among the two offices allow the president and the president’s office to be the dominant center of executive decision-making. The Office of the President (known as the Blue House) has the power and expertise to evaluate line ministries’ draft bills. As the real power center of the Korean government, the Blue House has divisions corresponding with the various line ministry responsibilities. The Blue House is supported in its oversight role by the Prime Minister’s Office and its Government Performance Evaluation Committee, as well as by public institutions such as the Korea Institute of Public Administration (KIPA). After taking office, President Lee dramatically reduced Blue House staff, potentially weakening the office’s expertise. However, many of the initially abolished positions were reinstated over time, as problems with GO expertise and implementation emerged.

The Prime Minister’s Office contains a “strategic cell” which helps the prime minister evaluate and steer policy. Typically, this oversight is shared with other deputy-prime ministers (one per party in the coalition) in regularly held meetings. Each of the advisors and experts in the cell specializes in one specific field. They assess the most important issues, as the relatively small size of the team limits its ability to deal with all issues at hand. Therefore, in many cases the team still has to rely on the technical expertise of the various ministerial cabinets, and considers more the political coherence of proposals in connection with the detailed governmental agreement.

The Danish Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is relatively small. It has a total of 91 employees, with 36 academics and 27 technical and administrative staff.

It is divided into two groups, one dealing with foreign policy and the second with domestic political and economic issues. There is also a law division and an administrative division. The prime minister has three portfolio tasks, namely the North Atlantic area, for example, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the press and constitutional law.

Being small, the PMO does not have a capacity to evaluate the details of all laws. But some officials are seconded from important line ministries to give the PMO a certain capacity. This capacity has been strengthened since the 1990s.

In Denmark there is a strong tradition of so-called minister rule (ministerstyre). A minister is in charge of a certain area (ressort). But the cabinet is a collective unit and it is supposed to have only one policy focus, for which the prime minister has the overall responsibility.

In the context of Hungary’s “chancellor democracy,” the Prime Minister’s Office has always been rather strong. Prime Minister Gyurcsány further expanded the Office’s sectoral policy expertise. Prime Minister Bajnai built on these changes, but did not initiate further changes.

The prime minister’s office (PMO) is known in Ireland as the Department of the Taoiseach. It is relatively large (employing over 300 people). Its sections include Economic Policy, Social Policy, Social Partnership, Public Services Modernization, and European and International Affairs. These sections “shadow” or monitor the work of the line departments – Finance, Social Welfare, Health, Education and so on. Considerable energy is devoted to turf wars and bureaucratic infighting as well as to genuine evaluation and monitoring of proposed legislation. The effectiveness of the prime minister’s office in improving the decision-making in line departments is difficult to assess.
The ability of the PMO to alter the views taken by the line ministries is crucially dependent on the analytical skills of its staff. In a public service that is short on analytical skills and training, the PMO is not preeminent, a fact that weakens its influence.

According to law, Luxembourg’s prime minister plays the role of a “primus inter pares” and as a consequence the Office of the Prime Minister (PMO) has no institutional resources to assess or control the activities of other ministries. Nevertheless, through informal contacts with line ministry civil servants a certain checking process is exercised and the respect of government priorities is enforced.
The PMO employs some 40 civil servants, and six of them can be considered senior officers (conseiller de gouvernement). Their number has doubled over recent years. Their background and training is primarily in law, economics or political science. Expertise in economics and finance is less well-represented. The number of diplomats working for the prime minister’s diplomatic cell has also been expanded, reflecting the increased role the prime minister plays in international affairs. As far as employee recruitment goes, partisan affiliation plays (or is supposed to play) a negligible role. But on the other hand membership in the prime minister’s party is not detrimental to recruitment.
The Inspectorate General of Finance (Inspection générale des finances, IGF) evaluates ministerial draft bills and participates in numerous interdepartmental committees. This can be considered part of the core government, especially as the prime minister was finance minister for a long period and remains treasury minister today.

The policy advisory group in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) currently consists of 14 staff who cover a broad spectrum of policy expertise. They concentrate on important bills, necessitating interagency coordination. Recent examples have been the prime minister’s summit on employment and projects for at-risk youth. In addition, special units and task forces are established in the DPMC that provide advice on a particular policy issue over a period of time.

In this area, there has been no substantive change as compared to the 2009 SGI report. The Prime Minister’s Private Office (PMO) so-called “gabinet” has some policy expertise, but of an insufficient level to assess draft bills fully in terms of policy content. The PMO is considerably larger today than in the early 1980s, when it had a maximum of 10 advisers and four secretaries (leading one observer to write that “it is estimated that the prime minister’s cabinet has very scant intervention in the legislative process. We do not know what kind of support the PMO provides for the purpose of preparing Council of Ministers’ meetings; everything suggests, however, that it provides essential personal and political support to the prime minister”). However, while PMOs have been given increasing policy oversight since the mid-1980s, they remain hybrid and multifunctional structures, largely lacking in-depth policy assessment capabilities. The pattern thus remains as outlined in the SGI 2009 report: Bills are discussed internally by the responsible ministries, by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in cases involving budgetary or foreign-policy issues), and in some (rare) cases with external social partners. The PMO also participates in these discussions, but largely in terms of political oversight rather than deep policy analysis.

The cabinet or government office (Ministerio de la Presidencia) and the prime minister’s office (Gabinete del Presidente del Gobierno) are the administrative departments associated with the Spanish premiership that are tasked with evaluating line ministry proposals from a political point of view. These two bodies are from a functional and even physical point of view nearly one, and form the very powerful political core of the executive (often called the Moncloa, after the name of the main palace hosting the prime minister in the outskirts of Madrid). The economic dimension of ministerial initiatives are evaluated by the Economic Office of the Prime Minister (formally joined to the PM’s Private Officein 2008) and by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, whose minister also acts as the second deputy prime minister. In general, these different units have ample staff with specific policy expertise, whose task is to substantively assess draft bills and other important sectoral initiatives to ensure they are compatible with the government’s strategic and budgetary priorities.
The internal organization of the PM’s Private Officevaguely reflects the various ministerial portfolios, although without achieving a comprehensive policy expertise that enables perfect oversight throughout the executive. Moreover, evaluations made by the advisors working in the PM’s Private Officeare not truly independent, since most of them are insiders. Nevertheless, and despite the extensive constitutional and political strength of the Spanish premiership, these units enjoy only limited administrative resources. Their relatively small size is perhaps explained by the hierarchical, single-party nature of the Spanish government, in which it is not particularly necessary to monitor sectoral ministers from the center.

Policy coordination among line ministries is considered the main problem in the Central Government Office (CGO). Ministries seem to be tentative about sharing information, control or resources. At the same time, there are procedures in place to increase coordination such as informal inter-ministerial groups drafting parts of governmental bills. A case study on the drafting of a bill on economic growth policy showed that the bill that was eventually submitted to parliament was version number 56 of the bill.
There is currently a reform process underway in the CGO, the so-called “RK-Styr” reform. The objectives of the reform are to significantly increase coordination among line ministries in order for them to be more apt at steering the agencies. Lack of coordination means a lack of steering capacity. Since the PMO does not have day-to-day policy coordination as a main responsibility, coordination becomes more middle-level and ad hoc.
The challenge of efficient coordination is exacerbated by a growing number of overarching policy objectives – so-called mainstreamed goals – that all bills and directives to Royal Commissions should adhere to. The first mainstreamed goal, economic growth, was adopted in the early 1990s. Today, there are 16 such mainstreamed goals, including gender equality, sustainable development and ethnicity. The latest cluster of mainstreamed goals to enter the list was the U.N. Bill of Rights. The main problem with this arrangement is that with the exception of gender equality there is no organization or part of any organization that “owns” the issue. Thus, while all bills drafted in the CGO are expected to promote all 16 mainstreamed goals there is no person or body assigned to make sure that this actually happens.
Coming back to an observation made earlier, the CGO in Sweden, which comprises the PMO and the line ministries, acts as a collective body in most aspects of decision-making. In terms of organizing the drafting of governmental bills or preparing Cabinet decisions, this work is typically done in the line ministries with little substantive oversight from the PMO. The role of the PMO is to control the flow of bills through the Cabinet and to the parliament and, to a lesser degree, to ensure that there are no inconsistencies or overlaps among the bills. Much of the policy coordination is done in inter-ministerial groups at the middle-level of the organizations.
Another source of coordination is the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Finance (MoF) took a higher profile within the CGO during the financial crisis in 1992 and has kept and even expanded that position since then. MoF routinely reviews bills and directives to Royal Commissions.

The chancellery is divided into six directorates, each with various numbers of subgroups that are again subdivided to better mirror the line ministries. The chancellery seems to coordinate its activities and function well when dealing with European politics and international tasks. In times of crisis, such as autumn 2008, the chancellery has effectively been able to coordinate fast-track legislation in close cooperation with the Ministry of Finance. However, in normal times, national policies are mainly worked out by the sectoral ministries in accordance with compromises made at the political level. In general, the chancellery does not autonomously evaluate important draft bills or assess them according to the government’s strategic and budgetary guidelines. With respect to budgetary issues, the finance minister is dominant, acting as the guardian of fiscal discipline. In other fields, stop-and-go processes that are often publicly debated take place until a compromise is reached, and the chancellery and line ministries often work out the legal or technical details only at that point. In addition, it seems that the chancellery’s capacities are not as deep as those of the line ministries.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) evaluates all draft bills before they are submitted to the Council of Ministers (the Italian cabinet) for approval. This scrutiny mainly deals with legal aspects (which now increasingly concern compatibility with European laws) as the PMO itself does not have the systematic sectoral expertise that would allow it to conduct a detailed policy scrutiny. This means intervention by the PMO is more reactive than proactive. The office gets more deeply involved in issues when problems emerge during the policy-making process. Important draft bills are in general scrutinized by the office with regard to the effects a bill may have on the cohesion of the majority coalition. A detailed scrutiny of the financial implications of each bill is conducted by the Treasury.

As head of a coalition cabinet, the Dutch prime minister is less a “boss” than a “primus inter pares.” The other ministers serve with, not under him (Daalder). He is nonetheless formally in charge of coordinating government policy as a whole, and has a concomitant range of competencies: deciding on the composition of the cabinet agenda and formulating its conclusions and decisions; chairing cabinet meetings, committees (onderraad) and (in most cases) ministerial committees; adjudicating interministerial conflicts; serving as the first speaker to the press and in parliament, and especially in international forums and arenas (e.g., EU and the United Nations) on behalf of the cabinet and Dutch government as a whole.
Cabinet meetings involve ministers exclusively; there are no deputy ministers or top-level civil servants present at these meetings. In cabinet meetings, ministers make decisions based on documents that have been prepared, discussed and coordinated first in interdepartmental administrative commissions, or “nodes,” and interdepartmental “front gates” (so-called voorportaal, or nodes that steer and coordinate other nodes), and then in ministerial or cabinet committee meetings. The stratification of interests along line ministry or party lines is a powerful force at each stage of the process in preparing documents for the cabinet. Formally, ministers represent their respective departments and rely heavily on the advice provided by their departments in all meetings. Ministers from one coalition party are accompanied by a deputy minister (who is not part of the cabinet, but a member of the coalition partner’s party) in order to ensure ministerial bipartisanship. The forces of compartmentalization are exacerbated by the fact that parliament’s committee system stringently follows budget allocations for departments within each ministry. A further factor to consider is the fact that in the media, the prime minister must act as the political leader of his party – less so of the coalition cabinet.
The prime minister’s own Ministry of General Affairs office has at its disposal only some 14 advising counsels (raadadviseurs, with junior assistants), who directly advise him on policy proposals and serve as secretaries of cabinet and ministerial committees. The advising counsels are top-level civil servants, not political appointees. In addition, the prime minister has a special relationship with the Scientific Council of Government Policy (WRR). Sometimes, deputy directors of the planning agencies play the role of secretaries for interdepartmental “front gates.” Nonetheless, it is safe to say that the prime minister, his administrative staff and scientific advisors hardly have sufficient expertise to assess departmental bills and white papers in detail, although this depends on their respective leadership qualities and grasp of policy issues. (Former prime ministers such as Ruud Lubbers and Wim Kok are generally considered to have demonstrated a strong grasp of policy issues, unlike the members of the Balkenende IV cabinet).

The Office of the Government of the Czech Republic is relatively small and has little sectoral policy expertise. It prepares cabinet meetings, but lacks the capacity to evaluate draft bills. Moreover, the advisers appointed by the prime ministers tend to be experts in political infighting rather than policy specialists.

The Swiss political system does not have a prime minister or a prime minister’s office. The government is a collegial body. However, there are several instruments of interministerial coordination and mechanisms to evaluate ministerial draft bills. Departments engage in a formal process of consultation when drafting proposals, the Ministry of Justice provides legal evaluations of draft bills, and the Federal Chancellery and Federal Council provide political coordination.

The prime minister, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, ensures cooperation among the ministries, and supervises the implementation of the government’s general policy (Article 112 of the constitution). The Undersecretariat of the Prime Ministry maintains coordination and cooperation among and between the ministries. The General Directorate of Laws and Resolutions of the Prime Ministry examines the congruity of draft bills, decrees, statutes, regulations and Council of Ministers resolutions with the constitution, as well as reviewing laws, general principles of law, development plans and programs, and the government program. This unit is the primary government entity in terms of drafting and coordinating new regulations. It is hard to say that all draft bills are the product of expert advice, however. During the period under review, numerous adjustments to draft bills during their approval by parliament showed that this standard was only partly met.
Recently, the Economy Coordination Board, composed of the minister of finance and state ministers in charge of economic affairs, was established in order to evaluate economic and financial matters.
Regarding the adequacy of draft bills and their correspondence with policy objectives, the government office is only rarely equipped to evaluate the content of line ministry proposals appropriately.
However, due to the strong position of the bureaucracy in Turkey, conflicts are more likely to occur along the fault lines associated with the bureaucracy rather than between party politicians – thus, between an undersecretary and minister, rather than between ministries and the prime minister’s office.

The PMO consists of several branches corresponding to specific policy areas (e.g., economy, foreign policy, constitutional and legal affairs) and secretarial services. The structure and size of the PMO have changed several times since it was first founded as an institution in 1982. However, with the possible exception of the Konstantinos Simitis years (1996 – 2004), a lack of expert staff, infrastructure and other resources has left the PMO without sufficient capacity to guide government policy, let alone evaluate draft bills. In the Karamanlis government, the PMO worked in parallel with an ad hoc group of cabinet ministers and party cadres who met daily to assess current affairs and manage the government’s public image.
Ministries have been able to perform last-minute redrafts of government bills with little effective input from the PMO, providing scope to engage in clientelistic and/or corrupt activity. Moreover, there are limited resources allowing new legislation to be checked for consistency with existing statutes; as a result, court challenges frequently thwart the implementation of new initiatives.
In the Papandreou government, the PMO has been strengthened through a number of measures, including the hiring of expert staff (advisors to Papandreou with expertise in law, economics and public management); the assignment of the task of assessing the government’s legislative production and priorities to a government vice president and a minister without portfolio; and the enlistment of a group of foreign experts from the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Australia to reorganize the PMO and help in enhancing the government’s strategic management capacity.

Slovakia has a strong tradition of departmentalism and collegial cabinets (Blondel et al. 2007). The Government Office focuses on the legal and technical coherence of draft bills, but lacks the capacity and sectoral expertise to evaluate their policy content. Prime Minister Fico made little use of the policy expertise available at the Government Office.

Government policy is supposed to be coordinated in the Chancellery. However, inter-ministerial coordination takes place empirically through the informal cabinet meetings scheduled ahead of the formal cabinet meetings. If the informal meeting has not reached the necessary consensus, the disputed issues will be discussed between the two party leaders, the chancellor and the vice chancellor.
The Austrian system gives the individual cabinet ministers a maximum of autonomy. This autonomy, however, depends on the intra-party authority of the party leaders (chancellor and vice chancellor) to form a consistent strategy despite their formal limitations, first within each of the two governing parties and then within the cabinet as such. Each minister can start initiatives but he/she has always to look for consensus within his or her own party and the entire cabinet.
There is no central government office; the office of the chancellor is one ministry among others, the chancellor first among equals. The constitutional department (Verfassungsdienst) within the Chancellery bears some similarity to a central government office by checking the compatibility of any ministerial initiative with the constitution. However, the constitutional department does not take strategic orientations into account.