Why are women underrepresented in civil service management across rich democracies? We argue that government ideology matters for this question, and that women bureaucrats’ careers stagnate under right-wing governments, since they do not suppress gender-inequality-reinforcing promotion patterns. We examine this using administrative occupation data on all Danish central government employees, observed quarterly from 1998 to 2019. The evidence is consistent with our argument: Under left-wing governments, men and women in the civil service progress similarly, while women progress more slowly than men under right-wing governments. The gender gap in career progression widens at the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, where political attention is greater, and this gap is not reduced by the presence of women ministers.

Thousands of federal policies have been produced by coalitions of executive agencies over the last few decades. Despite this, little attention has been paid to why agencies collaborate. The decision among relatively autonomous agencies to collaborate and therefore cede some of their power demands theoretical attention. I argue that agencies form coalitions to overcome legislative oversight attempts by activating veto points and exploiting collective action problems in Congress. Using data on dozens of agencies over twenty-four years, I find that agencies form policy-making coalitions when it helps them activate veto points and exploit collective action problems among their overseers in Congress: namely, committee freeriding in oversight and legislative gridlock in lawmaking. These collective action problems, in turn, inhibit Congressional attempts to overturn bureaucratically led policies and therefore allow agency policies to stick. Agencies form coalitions actively in order to insulate their policies against congressional oversight.

When implementing EU policies, national policy bureaucracies often face a goal conflict when national policy preferences are not aligned with the EU policy and they are granted little discretion in implementation: While customized implementation allows them to adjust EU policies to the national context, it also risks noncompliance with EU law and blame for unpopular EU policies. This bureaucratic politics perspective has received little attention in institutionalist and interest-based explanations of customized implementation. With a bureaucratic politics approach, this article argues that national governments pursue strategies of blame avoidance and reputation seeking when confronted with high goal conflict between timely and correct implementation and substantive (national) policy goals. This argument is illustrated in a comparative case study on the implementation of the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive in France and Germany. This article identifies bureaucratic strategies of blame avoidance and reputation seeking as an underlying mechanism of customized implementation.

Do advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision making, advisers’ predispositions regarding the use of force shape state behavior through the counsel advisers provide in deliberations. To test our argument, we introduce an original data set of 2,685 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,134 Cold War–era foreign policy decision makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness affects both the counsel that advisers provide in deliberations and the decisions leaders make: conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions. The theory and findings enrich our understanding of international conflict by demonstrating how advisers’ dispositions, which aggregate through the counsel advisers provide, systematically shape foreign policy behavior.

Why do executive agencies form coalitions? Legislative coalitions are widely theorized and studied, but less attention has been paid to executive coalitions. Executive agencies’ dependence on the political branches calls for a distinctive theory of coalition building. This article presents such a theory, arguing that agencies form coalitions to optimize their autonomy given their subordinate position in a separation of powers system by signaling to overseers that their policies are efficient and should be maintained. Bureaucrats form coalitions actively to advance their policy goals in the face of political opposition. Using data on dozens of agencies over seventeen years, I find that agencies are most likely to form coalitions when their preferences are misaligned with the president but aligned with each other. I also find evidence that coalitions send credible signals that bureaucratic policies are efficient since Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is less likely to request regulatory revisions of policies produced by coalitions.

Why do policy experimentation regimes breakdown? And, if there are recognizable patterns of experimental failure, what might explain the variation? Focusing on aviation, finance and food safety, this article considers why a policy style that has been credited with China's successes in the past is failing to address governance challenges in these sectors at present. The article moves beyond discussions of policy mis-implementation by reframing experimental failure as a case of policy maladaptation under conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Maladaptation describes how approaches used in previous periods to foster adaptation can inadvertently make a system less resilient in the future. The analysis shows how the degree of consolidation of previously successful experimental regimes lends itself to certain types of maladaptation in the present: consolidated regimes are unable to generate policy alternatives (aviation), moderately consolidated regimes are maladapted for selection (finance), and unconsolidated regimes impede niche creation (food safety).

Traditional analysis of China's policy experimentation has focused on the role of central–local relations and rotating leaders in shaping the local agenda-setting process. Less is known about the role of less mobile mid-level local bureaucrats who serve as bridges in the implementation process. This paper examines why some cities have performed better than others at implementing and maintaining low-carbon policy experiments. Drawing on a comparison of four case cities and over 100 expert interviews, I argue that the availability of bureaucratic entrepreneurs and their resource mobilization capacity determine the level of local engagement in climate policy experimentation. This study shows that the institutionalization of local policy experiments is not only driven by the central government or rotating top local leaders but also by bureaucratic entrepreneurs who help policy experiments survive periodic changes in the bureaucracy. The findings have important implications for the fulfilment of China's 2060 carbon neutrality pledge.