Publication details
Beyond Visibility : Unrecognized Advisers in Policy Advisory Systems
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psj.70080 |
| Doi | https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70080 |
| Keywords | advice-giving mechanism; invisible adviser; meritocracy; patronage; policy advisory system; value congruence |
| Description | Recent research on policy advisory systems (PAS) has highlighted their variation across regions, jurisdictions, time, and policydomains, emphasizing the role of policy advice access to issue networks and ideational compatibility between advisers and ad-visees as key factors. While PAS scholarship is expanding, it remains underpinned by implicit assumptions that advisers operatewithin permanent, meritocratically selected bureaucracies and that policy actors function in an open, pluralistic political culturethat prioritizes expertise. The article advances the study of PAS by introducing the advice-giving mechanism (AGM) frameworkto explain how ministerial advisers gain influence in both meritocratic and patronage-based bureaucracies. The study demon-strates that the character of the bureaucracy conditions the strategies, visibility, and influence of advisers. It also explores howinvisible advisers enter the PAS, interact with other executive actors, and assume distinct roles, thus indicating their access todecision-making. The article identifies new types of ministerial advisers in such contexts: lone rangers and personal trustees,whose emergence challenges conventional models of policy advice. The AGM framework highlights how informal, often adviser-driven entry, their operation outside formal hierarchies, and isolation from other actors amplify their influence, raising concernsabout transparency and legitimacy in patronage-based and polarized governance settings. |
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