Measuring Pressure on Public Administration: A New Empirical Approach

How does pressure on public administration(s) manifest in the media and in political debates? Answering this question is crucial since public administrations have recently been exposed to increasing degrees of political and media pressure. However, there exists no general measurement approach for capturing the extent or degree of political and media pressure that public administration and their members are exposed to. This paper provides an indicator set that tracks pressure on public administration and its agencies. We test this new indicator set by analysing newspaper articles and parliamentary debates in Switzerland between 2000 and 2025, showing which public administration entities are mentioned by whom, for what, and how. By combining named entity recognition, sentiment analysis and topic modelling we identify different forms of political and media pressure in large bodies of Swiss newspapers and parliamentary debates and explore changes in pressure across issue contexts and over time. We validate our results through semi-structured interviews with representatives of affected public agencies. We expect that pressure is multifaceted and not only entails pressure stemming from general bureaucracy blaming but also concerns performance of concrete public agencies. These findings have important implications for the functioning of public administration in adverse conditions.