In and out the centre of executive power: a prosopographic study of career patterns of ministerial advisers in Belgium

Ministerial advisers are key players in the executive triangle of government. In Belgium, despite indications of their central role in the machinery of government, systematic and longitudinal knowledge is still lacking about the profiles of those men and women and their personal journeys in and out ministerial offices. What do career patterns of ministerial advisers look like? What leads individuals to take up the role of advisers at some point of their life, to maintain themselves in those top executive circles, or to finally stop working for ministers, become one themselves and do something altogether different? Through the quantitative analysis of biographical and professional data, and triangulation by elite interviews, this project promises base line research on ministerial advisers’ careers. It also attempts to uncover the factors shaping their trajectories, which are mainly linked to the functioning of partitocratic mechanisms and the demands for policy experts and professionals at the level of federal and regional governments. Unraveling the tension between party political control and policy professionalisation through the lens of individual level data serves three purposes that will eventually pave the way for solid comparative research: closing empirical gaps, theorising the nature of a particular core executive elite, and upscaling prosopographic methods for comparative research designs.