Beyond Visibility: Unrecognized Advisers in Policy Advisory Systems

ABSTRACT Recent research on policy advisory systems (PAS) has highlighted their variation across regions, jurisdictions, time, and policy domains, emphasizing the role of policy advice access to issue networks and ideational compatibility between advisers and advisees as key factors. While PAS scholarship is expanding, it remains underpinned by implicit assumptions that advisers operate within permanent, meritocratically selected bureaucracies and that policy actors function in an open, pluralistic political culture that prioritizes expertise. The article advances the study of PAS by introducing the advice‐giving mechanism (AGM) framework to explain how ministerial advisers gain influence in both meritocratic and patronage‐based bureaucracies. The study demonstrates that the character of the bureaucracy conditions the strategies, visibility, and influence of advisers. It also explores how invisible advisers enter the PAS, interact with other executive actors, and assume distinct roles, thus indicating their access to decision‐making. The article identifies new types of ministerial advisers in such contexts: lone rangers and personal trustees, whose emergence challenges conventional models of policy advice. The AGM framework highlights how informal, often adviser‐driven entry, their operation outside formal hierarchies, and isolation from other actors amplify their influence, raising concerns about transparency and legitimacy in patronage‐based and polarized governance settings.