The main purpose of the book is to assess the impact of socio-economic and political developments of the last decades on the status and role definition of top civil servants. The authors speculate how changes in the educational system, the growth of managerial theory, the development of the party system, the growth of government and increasing complexity of its internal structure, and – though weakly developed – of EU membership might lead to convergent role definitions for senior civil servants.

The book is of two minds on this question. On the one hand, the editors claim that ‘change does not appear to have followed any one expected pattern’ (p. 266). There are still major differences in social background, recruitment patterns and career development of top civil servants. Role and status have changed, but it is impossible to generalize about the direction and magnitude of change or about the factors driving it. The book emphasizes the extraordinary resilience of different national bureaucratic traditions.

Path dependence, then, appears a powerful force in shaping bureaucracies, and particularly the role of senior civil servants. However, this conclusion is undercut by the second, and more compelling, argument in the concluding chapter, where the editors explain how top civil servants’ role has undergone major convergent change in one aspect, namely in their relationship with their political masters. Two issues have bedevilled bureaucracies in Europe over the past thirty years and have pulled senior civil servants on to converging paths. One has been the question of political control, i.e. how it can be guaranteed that top bureaucrats will serve a democratically elected government. By and large, the authors argue, there has been convergence on the French/German practice for selective direct partisan influence on senior appointments (‘commanding heights approach’), and this has weakened two rival notions: that of a neutral civil service (as in Britain or the Netherlands) or of a party-card bureaucracy reflecting party strength (as in Austria, Belgium or Greece). Another issue of contention concerns bureaucratic efficiency, an ambivalent concept that raises the prior issue of whether a bureaucracy should be judged by analogy with the market or as an organization with distinctive public purposes. The authors examine the differential impact of New Public Management (NPM), which is explicitly based on ‘an application of the logic of a Betrieb ...to the erstwhile Hegelian magical state’ (p. 274). In all countries, there has been a shift to NPM ideas, although they have taken root most strongly where the conception of public authority was already weak. These two trends have fundamentally redefined the role of top civil servants in a way that is remarkably similar across countries.

The editors finish with the fascinating hypothesis that these trends to selective politicization and greater managerial efficiency have led to ‘a de-institutionalization or personalization of political trust’. Trust used to flow automatically from a civil servant’s membership of an institution: in a party-card system, from one’s party membership; in a tradition of administrative neutrality, from one’s position in the hierarchy. But trust in the bureaucracy as an institution has withered; instead, whether a civil servant wins the trust of his political masters depends now much more on the personal characteristics of the man or woman: the individual with good social and political skills, with personal ties with political masters, or with the personal managerial qualities that politicians recognize. This is an intriguing hypothesis, which unfortunately remains unexplored in the individual country chapters.

The book fills two important lacunae in the literature on public administration and political élites. First, the country span of the book is unique. As the editors point out, except for Britain, France and Germany, there is precious little material available in English (or another major language) on many countries. The chapters on Greece (Dimitri Sotiropoulos), Spain (Ignacio Molina), on Austria (Barbara Liegl and Wolfgang Muller) and on Belgium (Marleen Brans and Annie Hondeghem) are therefore highly informative; they also happen to be, together with the conclusion, the strongest chapters in the book. And although the authors eschew rigorous data analysis, most chapters present empirical data – sometimes not previously published in English – in systematic fashion. Second, this study reaffirms the analytical power of a socio-structural analysis of positions and role definitions of top civil servants. It starts from the assumption that an examination of social characteristics and recruitment or career patterns provides considerable leverage in understanding change in top civil servants’ roles. This complements the socio-psychological analyses pioneered by Aberbach, Rockman and Putnam, which examine role definitions by mapping the attitudes or orientations of individual top officials. They usually base their analysis on interview or survey data.

A major downside of the book concerns its rather dismissive treatment of other studies, particularly those with an alternative conceptualization or method. The editors of this book discard for example attitudional studies of top civil servants on the grounds that such studies do not allow for a dynamic analysis. But this is a weak argument. Not only is it possible to design a study of top officials over multiple time points – the kind of exercise that Aberbach and Rockman have been engaged in for US federal civil servants since the 1980s and have carried on throughout the 1990s. It is also possible, through statistical analysis, to examine dynamic elements such as the impact of length of service, recruitment cohort, age, etc. The criticism appears to be rooted in a deep, though implicit distrust of attitudes – ‘words’ rather than ‘deeds’ – and the methodology of interviews and surveys. This reviewer begs to disagree; the study of attitudes or orientations of both élites and the mass public has acquired considerable sophistication in the 1990s. Much of this has been achieved in the subfield of American politics, but some has been developed in British politics as well (for example Donald Searing (1994) on the roles of British parliamentarians). The authors have missed a chance to use this literature.

But these criticisms do not detract from this highly valuable contribution to public administration. The book is richer in empirical evidence than in conceptual language. There is no grand theoretical ambition here; the book is instead infused with a respect for uniqueness and complexity, and a measured scepticism about swift generalization. Those who knew the late Vincent Wright and know Edward Page will recognize their conscious hand in this. Yet the book casts a perceptive eye on the changing role of top civil servants in Europe, and it suggests a potential groundswell in the relationships between bureaucracy, politics and society.