“Politicians are puppets in the hands of bureaucrats”. Discuss.

... "Politicians are puppets in the hands of bureaucrats". Discuss. Above mentioned quotation refers to the expansion of the modern state and the increasing complexity of governmental tasks, which has led to an increase of the importance of civil servants, whose task is no longer merely administrative but also political to the extent that their advice and expertise influences agenda-setting, policy-making as well as policy implementation- a development, which has been labelled "bureaucratisation of politics" or alternatively "politisation of bureaucracy". I will argue that the role of bureaucrats clearly does no longer perform a purely administrative role but do shape policy-making processes and thereby politicians decisions but their degree of influence seems to vary substantially across countries and that they do not seem to dominate over politicians and I will therefore reject the stated hypothesis. The following will present the scholarly debate notably the findings of E. Page, who argues that the

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