Unwritten Rules of the Game in the Danish and Dutch Core Executives

ABSTRACT What allows ministers and senior civil servants to survive, or even thrive, in their political‐administrative contexts? Based upon a multi‐sited ethnography, this article identifies the unwritten “rules of the game” among elite political and administrative actors in the Danish and Dutch core executives and analyzes their beliefs about how to survive and thrive at the apex of executive government. The analysis is grounded in core executive research and seeks to advance our understanding of the beliefs and practices that shape the behavior of government elites. Our decentered approach to qualitative inquiry allows us to identify a high degree of overlap between how Danish and Dutch core executive actors understand the unwritten rules of the systems they inhabit. This suggests that despite formal structural differences between core executive systems, they perhaps differ significantly less in practice, as the beliefs and behaviors of ministers and senior public servants are more alike than classic accounts would suggest.