Representative nationalism? Comparing nationalist attitudes between public servants and the public they serve

The literature on representative bureaucracy argues that public administrations achieve better outcomes for the population they serve if they are similar in sociodemographic features and attitudes to this population (e.g., Riccucci & Van Ryzin 2017). Empirically, the literature focuses primarily on representativeness in terms of class, ethnicity, and gender (Ding et al. 2021; Bishu & Kennedy 2020). An assumption that is central to the theory but often remains implicit is that similarity in sociodemographic features leads to a similarity in attitudes. This project explicitly explores similarity in attitudes, especially attitudes related to national identity. It builds on recent advances in sociology about the conceptualization of nationalism and the multiple dimensions of nationalist attitudes: attachment, membership, pride, hubris (Bonikowski & DiMaggio 2016; Bonikowski 2017; 2021). The main purpose is exploratory and descriptive: Using various surveys (World Value Survey, European Value Survey, International Social Survey Program), the paper maps nationalist attitudes among public employees in several countries. These attitudes are compared to those of the general population, and the relative gaps (or overlaps) between public and public servants’ attitudes are compared across countries. This comparative-descriptive mapping is a useful first step necessary to address causal questions: Does sociodemographic similarity explain or ensure similarity in nationalist attitudes? Which country-specific factors can explain a larger or smaller gap in nationalist attitudes between the public and public servants: civil service systems (Van der Meer et al. 2015), administrative traditions (Painter & Peters 2010; Peters 2021), or others? The paper also discusses normative implications: Is representativeness good when it comes to nationalist attitudes? Or does it reproduce stereotypes of societal majorities to the detriment of minority groups, leading to the biased provision of public services? The paper further contributes to the growing literature on populism and bureaucracy (Bauer et al. 2021) by discussing the role of public servants’ attitudes in turbulent political environments. Norms are an important dimension of the bureaucracy (Bauer et al. 2021; Bauer & Becker 2020). Bureaucrats’ norms and ideas about who is a legitimate member of the nation and how central the nation should be in public decision-making and service delivery are particularly relevant when the bureaucracy is instrumentalized by populist politicians whose narratives and ideologies are often linked with nationalism. How compatible bureaucrats’ norms are with such ideologies and goals may be one explanation for cross-country variation in bureaucratic resilience to populist influences.