Public Sector Employees’ Political Activity Across Administrative Traditions: Tensions Between Democratic Participation and Bureaucratic Impartiality in an Era of Populism and Democratic Backsliding
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it