“Most MPs are Not All that Sharp.” Political Employees and Representative Democracy

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the orientations of political employees in Sweden. It finds that their roles are diffuse: there is no agreement among political employees about whether they are politicians or not, and their mandate is fleeting and unclear. They hold the average politician’s intellectual abilities in low regard, and sometimes take on clearly paternalistic views toward elected representatives. They see little attraction in pursuing a career as elected politicians, because of intrusive media scrutiny and since they hold a view of elected politics as slow, boring, and shallow. The professional route to politics is seen as more fast and fun.

KEYWORDS:

• Political advisors
• political employee
• politicians
• Sweden
• democracy

Notes

^1. In Sweden, the Government Offices form a single, integrated public authority comprising the Prime Minister’s Office, the government ministries and the Office for Administrative Affairs. (http://www.government.se/the-government-offices/)

^2. In a recent issue of the International Journal of Public Administration (38:1, 2015), devoted to the role of political advisors, one of the papers claims that “much of what [they] do on a day-to-day basis, and across political systems, remains unclear.” (Rice et al., 2015, p. 5)

^3. Two striking examples were the incoming Swedish government in 1976 which put an end to 44 years of Social Democratic rule, and the first government under Tony Blair in Britain in 1997 after 18 years of Conservative rule. The Swedish liberal politician Bert Levin describes the experience of meeting “a forest of red needles” (indicating Social Democratic sympathies) among the civil servants (Levin, 1983), an experience which prompted the recruitment of additional political advisors to the Government Offices. Similarly, the dramatic rise in the number of political advisors under Blair can to some extent be interpreted as triggered by a perceived need to counter a civil service suspected to be infused with Thatcherite perspectives (Blick & Jones, 2013, Ch. 6).

^4. All translations from Swedish for this article were made by the author. In order to guarantee the anonymity of interviewees, specific organizational titles are sometimes replaced with more generic ones, and the gender of the interviewees is withheld. For further details of the data collection and analysis, see (Garsten et al., 2015, Methods appendix).

^5. The interviews were designed to cover three main topics: (1) the work of policy professionals as a specific form of political influence; (2) the occupation and career choices of policy professionals; and (3) the labor market for policy professionals. For each topic, a number of themes were covered in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the work and careers of policy professionals in Sweden.

^6. Information from this mapping was collected mainly from open web sources complemented with a small-scale survey administered to local and regional political secretaries.

^7. Among the 17 political advisors/secretaries who had a clear political background, 12 saw themselves as politicians, and only one person as an administrator. For the remaining 4, the role was mixed or unclear. Among the 9 who had a clear administrator background, 8 saw themselves as administrators and none claimed they were a politician. Among the 10 who had a mixed political and administrative background, the most common response (5) was that they could not judge whether they were politicians or not. Even though the sample is small (N = 36), the result is so clear-cut that it cannot be neglected.

Additional information

Funding

The research has been funded by the Swedish Research Council (project grants 421-2011-1369 and 421-2014-962).