: Denmark and Sweden have fairly similar political systems: Proportional voting, multiparty systems, mainly minority governments, a large public sector, a corporatist legacy etc. Yet, their systems for organising political advice are very different. Denmark has a full scale merit bureaucracy, and only politically appointed advisors without administrative responsibility. Sweden has a much larger number of political employees, and some top administrative positions are filled by political employees. In single country studies it is difficult to assess the effects of political appointees, because changes come gradually with the ensuing problems of sorting out the marginal effects of political appointees. We exploit the possibility of a most similar systems design to assess the consequences of different ways of organising political advice by a comparison of Denmark and Sweden. We draw on a recent survey of civil servants and political appointees in the central administration of Denmark and Sweden.
