Politico-Administrative Relations

Montenegro has only formally set the boundary between professional functions and political appointments in state administration. Even though the room for political influence on senior management staff and heads of authorities has been reduced with the new Law on Civil Servants and State Employees, the legal framework is still plagued by inconsistencies and imprecise norms that have an adverse effect on the overall efforts towards professionalising the state administration.

According to the existing regulation, senior civil servants do not need to be experts or specialists in the areas they cover. On average, they are mostly required to have an undergraduate degree in social sciences and at least three years of working experience in managerial positions or positions requiring autonomy. The awareness of the need for their further professional development is low, which results in their very low participation in trainings offered by the Human Resources Management Authority.

The legal framework is ridden with shortcomings when it comes to regulating the status of senior civil servants, such as insufficient provisions relating to the conditions for their dismissal and the absence of the requirement of their work’s appraisal. Appraisal of the senior managers’ performance is superficial, and it neglects specific benchmarks existing for their performance appraisal. The rigid wage policy for state management staff leaves little room for flexibility and additional stimuli, a consequence of which is that relatively low salaries are being supplemented through additional remuneration for membership in various working bodies and state enterprises’ managing boards. The average monthly income of most senior civil servants is around EUR 1.000.

Another reason for concern is that the nominally professional nature of the senior civil service is in reality subject to direct political influence through informal practices. A considerable number of senior civil servants, at least 90 of them, are simultaneously members of organs of political parties currently in power, which indicates that Montenegro's senior civil service is in a conflicting situation of being torn between political priorities of the ruling parties, on the one hand, and the reform priorities, on the other hand. Consequently, the need for further prevention of political influence on this level of state administration is all the greater. An adoption of a special framework of competencies for senior civil servants, which in effect would contain a list of all the necessary skills they must possess, would be a good starting point for further professionalisation of these positions. Legal amendments should also thwart this cadre from participating in managing or advisory bodies of all political parties, and should define very precisely their rights and obligations in cases of deciding to run in elections.

This study examines the transparency of the regulatory framework under which ministerial advisors exist within the politicized context of a Central and Eastern European perspective. We compare profiles and career paths of ministerial advisers under five different types of coalition governments and examine if variance across government types can be explained by type of party – established vs. new parties. Empirically, the article draws on a cohort of 162 ministerial advisers in Slovakia across five governments from 2010 to 2020. We arrive at multiple findings. Firstly, we suggest the limitation in the availability and reporting of data is an important finding as it highlights accountability gaps and lack of government transparency irrespective of the party in power. Secondly, within the low regulatory environment, ministers appoint multiple types of staff including both formal “visible” ministerial advisers and “invisible” ministerial agents that, if one could accurately measure, would likely demonstrate that the ministerial advisory system is more inflated than we currently present. The ad hoc nature of the advisory system also creates fluctuations in the size of the ministerial adviser cohort across governments and across different ministries. This would also help to explain the next finding which, contrary to the experience in many countries, the overall size of the advisor population does not grow, probably because executive politicians have other avenues of appointing advisory agents. Fourthly, the advisers have a fairly equal distribution of prior employment from both the public sector and private sector, but we do see some evidence of more established political parties preferring to recruit from the public sector and newer parties preferring to recruit from the private sector. Lastly, the appointment process appears to be highly controlled by individual ministers, suggesting personal ties are essential (link between ministerial and advisor education) and party-political criteria are a low consideration. The research is conducted using a biographical approach in which freedom of information requests and open source data is scrapped, and then triangulated via a dozen interviews with current and former advisers. It argues that regulation is weak, lacking public scrutiny, which provides loopholes for employing ministerial agents in informal ways that could create, at worst, the opportunity for corrupt behavior, or at least, lead to poor practices in good governance. Therefore, future research should focus on both the formal “visible” and informal “invisible” ways that ministers recruit their advisory agents, how their agents function, and whether existing regulatory measures create a transparent and accountable governance framework.