Public servants, anonymity, and political activity online: bureaucratic neutrality in peril?
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852318780452 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Public servants,
anonymity, and political
activity online:
bureaucratic neutrality
in peril?
Christopher A. Cooper
University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
Various actors have recently expressed concern that by threatening anonymity, social
media places the bureaucracy’s neutrality in jeopardy. Yet, empirically, little is known
about the online political activities of public servants. Drawing upon the public service
motivation literature, this article develops contrasting hypotheses between public
sector employment and online political activity. Testing hypotheses with survey data
from Canada, the results show that unionized public sector employment reduces the
probability of being politically active online. As social media continues to change the
nature of governance, the results suggest that anonymity and neutrality remain impor-
tant professional norms within the Westminster administrative tradition, and are
reflected in the online political activities of public sector employees in Canada.
Points for practitioners
•Due to its visibility and permanency, public servants’ political activity on social media
potentially threatens their reputation as politically impartial officials.
•Some governments and public sector unions have thus voiced messages of caution
to administrative personnel about the dangers of being politically active online.
•Survey data from Canada suggest that these messages have worked.
•Unionized public sector employment reduces the probability of being politically
active online but does not reduce the probability of being active in traditional
“offline” political activities.
Corresponding author:
Christopher A. Cooper, University of Ottawa, School of Political Studies, 120 University, Room 7005, FSS,
Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: Christopher.Cooper@uottawa.ca
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2020, Vol. 86(3) 496–512
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852318780452
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
Keywords
anonymity, bureaucracy, neutrality, political activity, social media, unionization
Introduction
In the Westminster administrative tradition, there is a strong interdependence
between the constitutional conventions of neutrally, permanency, and anonymity
(Rhodes et al., 2009). Alternatively referred to as the Whitehall model, the
Westminster administrative tradition found in the UK, Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand holds that public servants are politically neutral and provide impar-
tial service to governments, and, in return, governments refrain from purging
administrative personnel when taking office (Hood and Lodge, 2006).
An essential component supporting the exchange between neutrality and per-
manency is the principle of anonymity. To prevent opposition parties and the
public from perceiving public servants as being closely aligned with the governing
party, the work of officials has traditionally been kept out of view (Parris, 1969:
98). Recently, however, the development of social media, which allows users to
autonomously create, receive, and diffuse content, has been seen as challenging the
integrity of this tradition.
For some, social media directly infringes upon the tenet of neutrality, and has
politicized the work of public servants by pressuring them to defend the govern-
ment’s policies online (Aucoin, 2012). Yet, for others, the greatest challenge pre-
sented by social media is not an increase in pressure to undertake political actions,
but a reduction in their anonymity when doing so (Grube, 2015). The visibility of
working on social media makes public servants vulnerable to allegations that they
have become too close to the governing party and its policy agenda. Furthermore,
with the neutrality of public servants in question, it is possible that new govern-
ments will seek to control the bureaucracy by appointing personnel on the basis of
their political loyalty rather than on their merit (Hustedt and Salomonsen, 2014).
This is a concern given that merit recruitment is an important source of good
governance (Dahlstr€
om and Lapuente, 2017).
To date, however, attention has largely focused on how bureaucrats use social
media when working within their official positions (Djerf-Pierre and Pierre, 2016).
The challenge that social media presents to bureaucratic neutrality, however, is not
limited to officials’ actions within their formal roles. In their private lives, acting as
citizens, the online political activity of public sector employees may also jeopardize
their reputation as politically neutral. Yet, despite the seriousness of this subject,
we know little about the relationship between public sector employment and online
political activity. This article advances the research in this field by providing one of
the first empirical studies to examine this issue.
Drawing upon the public service motivation (PSM) literature, this article devel-
ops differing hypotheses between public sector employment and being politically
Cooper 497
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