Public Sector Employees’ Political Activity Across Administrative Traditions: Tensions Between Democratic Participation and Bureaucratic Impartiality in an Era of Populism and Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

In the face of a global rise of populism and democratic backsliding, several scholars have argued that public servants can play an important role in safeguarding the integrity of our democracies. But are public servants equally likely to be politically active in all countries? While a large body of scholarship has found that public sector employees participate in a variety of political activities more than private sector employees, most studies use data from a single, often Western, country. Drawing upon literature studying administrative traditions, this article theoretically considers differences in traditions’ participation-impartiality equilibrium —the balance struck between the democratic value of political participation and the bureaucratic value of impartiality—and hypothesizes that the nature of the relationship public sector employment has with political activity varies across countries belonging to different traditions. Using data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, this article empirically investigates whether the nature of the relationship public sector employment has with political activity varies across the Anglo-American, Nordic, Germanic, Napoleonic, Confucian, and Latin American administrative traditions in ways that are consistent with differences in their participation-impartiality equilibrium. The results from various multivariate regression models show that administrative traditions do matter. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, public sector employment’s positive relationship with political activity is less pronounced in the Anglo-American, Nordic and Confucian administrative traditions than in the Germanic, Napoleonic and Latin American traditions. The findings suggest that public sector employees’ role in protecting democratic principles, at least as far as participating in the political realm as private citizens, will likely vary across countries belonging to different administrative traditions.

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