## Notes from 26 December 2025 [[2025-12-25|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2025-12-27|Next note →]] Read a [new article](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10841806.2025.2595591#abstract) by [[Sylvia Veit]] and [Jana Marleen Walter](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jana-marleen-walter-2a2437244/) on recruitment-based politicization in German federal ministries, published in _Administrative Theory & Praxis_ on December 18. Sylvia's work on politics-administration relations has been consistently useful for thinking about civil service systems, so I was glad to see this come out. The article's core contribution is a typology of recruitment-based politicization based on interviews with 30 lower-ranking civil servants in six German ministries. Three types emerge: - **Non-politicization:** Entry via formalized meritocratic routes, self-perception anchored in rules and procedural integrity. These civil servants see political decisions as external mandates to implement professionally. - **Partisan recruitment:** Trajectories shaped by party affiliation or political appointments. Interviewees in this category rarely frame themselves as politically recruited—they emphasize functional contributions instead. But external perceptions are critical: colleagues see unfair advantages and distorted meritocracy. - **Professional politicization:** A hybrid type where civil servants enter via meritocratic routes but have prior experience in politically exposed environments (parliamentary offices, ministerial cabinets), or develop political skills after joining the bureaucracy. Political experience is treated as a complement to administrative competence, not a replacement for it. The most interesting finding is the asymmetry between self-perception and external perception. People tend to legitimize their own recruitment paths while viewing others through a more skeptical lens. Political proximity in oneself is "useful experience"; in others, it's patronage. Veit and Walter don't frame professional politicization as normatively good or bad—they present it as an empirical reality in the German system. The tone is closer to "this is how it works" than advocacy. But there's an implicit argument that professional politicization, when combined with meritocratic entry, represents a functional middle ground between pure technocracy and partisan capture. This is exactly what Chile's [[Sistema de Alta Dirección Pública (SADP)]] tries to institutionalize: a structured process that combines merit screening with political alignment for senior appointments. **The German model is interesting for what it doesn't have.** Professional politicization as Veit and Walter describe it flows in one direction: from bureaucracy toward politics. It can happen in two ways—someone enters the civil service already having political affinities (party membership, prior work in a parliamentary office), or someone develops political skills and connections after joining. Either way, the entry point is the traditional meritocratic route. What's absent is the reverse trajectory: the political figure who professionalizes by entering through a separate door. In the US and Brazil, you have political appointees who bring technocratic credentials into explicitly political positions (DAS cargos in Brazil, Schedule C appointments in the US). These are people selected primarily for political trust but who also have professional competence—what [Panizza, Peters, and Ramos Larraburu (2016)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/padm.12560) call "programmatic technocrats" in their patronage typology. The French system has a different dynamic: senior civil servants have career incentives to move toward political roles (_cabinets ministériels_) and back, creating a circulation between administration and politics at the elite level. Germany doesn't really have either of these patterns. The reason this matters is tenure. In the US or Brazil, political appointees rotate out when governments change - they're temporary by design. In Germany, once you're _verbeamtet_, you have lifetime stability. There's no separate track for politically aligned talent that might leave when the coalition shifts. This came into focus recently when a [Die Linke inquiry](https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article255479356/Bundesregierung-verbeamtet-320-Mitarbeiter-auf-Lebenszeit-ohne-vorherige-Probezeit.html) in the Bundestag revealed that the Ampel coalition had granted _Beamte_ status to 320 individuals without the standard three-year probationary period, along with ~400 hires without public vacancy announcements. The issue isn't the procedural shortcut - it is that these individuals now hold permanent positions in a system built for career continuity. If professional politicization is supposed to combine merit with political responsiveness, granting lifetime tenure without normal vetting questions whether the 'merit' component is actually being maintained. Ultimately, the German system’s closure explains why it faces fewer scandals regarding incompetent appointees than the US or Brazil, though this insulation dampens its adaptability to rapid policy shifts. The core trade-off remains stability versus responsiveness. Chile’s SADP represents a notable attempt to bridge this gap, coupling structured merit assessment with political discretion—but crucially attaching it to fixed-term senior mandates rather than the lifetime tenure that defines the German model. Could a version of the German model incorporate something like Chile's approach without sacrificing institutional continuity? Or is the lifetime tenure of _Beamte_ status fundamentally incompatible with structured political-professional entry?