Institutions, politicians or ideas? To whom or what are public servants expected to be loyal?
| Author | Jon Pierre |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148119865078 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Breakthrough Commentaries |
research-article2019
Breakthrough Commentary
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
Institutions, politicians or ideas?
2019, Vol. 21(3) 487 –493
© The Author(s) 2019
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To whom or what are public
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148119865078
DOI: 10.1177/1369148119865078
servants expected to be loyal?
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Jon Pierre
Keywords
Guy Peters, institutions, Politics of Bureaucracy, public administration
Introduction: Limits to loyalty?
On 25 September 2018, 261 senior public servants in the Swedish Central Government
Office (CGO, in Swedish regeringskansliet) presented a statement to the administrative
director of the CGO. This was the day before the newly elected Parliament passed a vote
of no confidence against the Social Democratic Prime Minister Stefan Löfven. In the
statement, which was not made public but was only intended for the head of the CGO, the
signatories expressed concern whether the appointment of a new government, in some
way or other dependent on the support of the right-wing Sweden Democrats – although
their name was never mentioned – would impact the ‘normative foundation’ (värdegrund)
of Sweden’s policies. This normative foundation was mainly derived from the UN decla-
ration of Human Rights and the UNESCO Convention of the Rights of the Child as well
as the Swedish Constitution.
More specifically, the statement raised three questions (present author’s translation).
First,
Can the CGO as an employer guarantee that the next government or its parliamentary support
base will not undercut the CGOs normative foundation and policies in the areas of ethnicity and
non-discrimination? Will these policies remain regardless of which parties form government or
its parliamentary support base?
Second,
If the duty of loyalty towards the government and the employer CGO should conflict with the
Constitution’s rulings on equal rights and protection against discrimination as well as the CGO
personnel policy and equal opportunity and possibility plan, which takes precedence?
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Corresponding author:
Professor Jon Pierre, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, P. O. Box 711, SE-405 30
Gothenburg, Sweden.
Email: Jon.Pierre@pol.gu.se
488
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21(3)
Third and finally,
What does it mean to the CGO staff’s role as representatives of the CGO if representatives of
the government or its parliamentary support base argue that some of these public servants with
regard to their ethnic background, for instance Jews, Samis or Muslims, are not ‘Swedish’?
Sixty-five of the 261 signatories to the statement worked in the Department of Foreign
Affairs. None was politically appointed. To the best of my knowledge, the Director of the
CGO did not respond to the questions raised in the statement.
The statement, perhaps inevitably, was leaked and soon went viral. The reactions in
social media were mixed. A large number of comments supported the statement while
almost as many critiqued the signatories for failing in their lack of loyalty to any govern-
ment regardless of its ideological orientation. There was even a countercampaign, #not-
mystatement, launched, attracting almost as many signatories as the original statement.
The statement by the 261 senior public servants raises a host of issues regarding
administrative loyalty and responsiveness. Should public servants be invariably loyal to
the government of the day, quite regardless of its ideology? Or, does loyalty denote an
allegiance with and responsiveness to public office in general and the CGO in particular?
Does loyalty mean subscribing to the foundational ideas of the institution even when the
leadership of that institution does not support ideas and values? Furthermore, is loyalty
going out of fashion as trust-based relations in government and administration are increas-
ingly replaced by contractual arrangements (Bouckaert, 2012)?
The incident in the Swedish government office is intriguing, but the notion of public
servants standing up to political leaders is not new. Some time ago now, Brehm and Gates
(1999) studied the extent to which public servants in the US federal public service pre-
ferred work to either shirking or outright sabotaging the programmes they were supposed
to deliver. Sabotage, in their analysis, could either refer to passively undermining the
programme by slow-walking or doing everything strictly by the book which is a sure way
to delay policy action, or to outright sabotage the programme. Contrary to much public
choice-based theorising, their study showed that ‘the assumption that subordinates neces-
sarily prefer shirking over working is unnecessarily simplistic . . . Workers will prefer
producing some outputs over other outputs; they don’t necessarily shirk at every oppor-
tunity’ (Brehm and Gates, 1999: 43, italics...
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