01660nam a22001697a 4500 513629 513629 200313b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d Ebinger, Falk 18411 The partisan–professional dichotomy revisited: Politicization and decision‐making of senior civil servants Public Administration 97(4), 2019: p.861-876. Politicization has an ambivalent reputation among public administration scholars. While considered an effective instrument to safeguard political control over ministerial bureaucracy, partisanship of senior civil servants is likewise associated with patronage and is deemed detrimental to professionalism and meritocracy. To scrutinize this contradiction, the article examines how the party‐political background of senior civil servants influences their decision‐making behaviour. Two theoretically derived conceptions of loyalty are therefore put to the test: responsiveness and responsibility. Effects are captured by using the vignette technique in 40 in‐depth interviews with former senior civil servants from ministerial departments at federal and state level in Germany. The results are surprising in so far as they reveal that politicized senior civil servants act neither more responsively nor less responsibly than their non‐politicized peers. These findings challenge common assumptions and call for a more refined analysis of the conditions under which politicization leads to negative effects. - Reproduced. Veit, Sylvia 16825 Fromm, Nadin 16826 Public Administration CIVIL SERVICE ddc AR 0 0 ddc 0 0 387661 IIPA IIPA 2020-03-13 97(4), 2019: p.861-876. AR122782 2020-03-13 AR