Bureaucratic Roles, Administrative Organization and Norm Compliance

Synopsis 1. Civil servants play important roles as advisors to the political executive. 2. In pure merit systems they combine the roles of professional and political advisors providing ministers and the government with factual information in the form of typically statistical and basic legal information, policy analysis unravelling social, economic, legal and technological problems and impact analysis with political advice as to strategies promoting the incumbent government’s policy agenda. 3. According to democratic and legal thinking civil servants in their advisory capacity operate within a set of normative constraints that define their obligations toward the political executive of the day (responsiveness) and the limits to how far they can go to serve the will of their political masters. 4. These normative constraints are only partly legally defined and often they are unwritten thus being part of the prevailing bureaucratic culture. In other systems a formal codex has been issued offering guidance to civil servants as to their appropriate behavior when acting as political advisors to ministers and the government. Our research questions 1. How do civil servants react when confronted with requests from their political superiors that presumes their ability to strike the balance between political responsiveness and their simultaneous obligation to respect the law, speak truth, and provide policy-analytical advice respecting professional standards? 2. Civil servants’ roles are defined by the organizations within which they work. They work in different types of organizations, are placed at varying hierarchical levels, and may have generalist backgrounds (defined as social science degrees), alternatively specialist backgrounds (defined as science and technical degrees). So, the prime research question is: to which extent and how does administrative norm compliance vary with civil servants’ roles within the ministerial organization? Claim Formal role differentiation within the ministerial organization constitutes a complex organization where civil servants act in complementary roles when providing the political executive with policy and political advice. Norm compliance therefore depends on the way in which the interaction between civil servants acting in different roles is organized and on how the information contained in their advice is conveyed to the political executive. Data In early 2025 we conducted a large-scale survey among civil servants in all ministerial departments and 32 agencies in Danish central government. We achieved an overall response rate of 63%, leaving us with more than 9000 responses. The survey was partly a repetition of a 2015-vignette survey, partly a new questionnaire with questions about civil servants’ career trajectories.