A filter in the chain of command : A quantitative study on the extent to which officials in the Swedish Government Offices perceive that they are governed bythe political elite and ministerial advisers

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to investigate to what extent the officials within the Swedish Government Offices consider themselves to be governed by the political elite (ministers and state secretaries) and the ministerial advisers (chief of staffs, planning directors, political advisers and press secretaries). In an ideal chain of command, the political elite governs the officials, since the ministers are appointed by the Prime Minister to govern the Government Office’s different policy areas. During recent years, political scientists have started to chart a phenomenon of an increasing number of ministerial advisers within the public administration. The Swedish Parliament has no formal capability to review or dismiss these ministerial advisers. Which is considered to be problematic in terms of democratic legitimacy, since the ministerial advisers are neither recruited through a transparent recruitment process based on their merits, nor are they politically appointed based on election results. Hence, the link between election results and who is given the mandate to take part in the policy process within the Swedish Government Offices can be seen as tenuous. The officials are at the government’s disposal to prepare and implement policies, and to contribute with their expertise in different policy areas, regardless of which political party or political coalition that is governing at the time. Thus, the purpose of this thesis has been to study the government officials’ perspective, and to what extent they consider themselves to be governed by the political elite and ministerial advisers. 91 government officials have answered a survey regarding to what extent they perceive that they are governed by the different roles in the political staff, and to what extent they consider having contact with the different roles in the political staff. The collected material has made it possible to merge the officials’ perspective on the different roles within the political staff into the categories the political elite and the ministerial advisers. This has been done in order to calculate a confidence interval to estimate officials’ perspective on the two categories within the Govern- ment Offices as a whole. The main findings of the study are that officials within the Government Offices consider themselves to be governed to a greater extent by the political elite, compared to the ministerial advisers. Although the officials consider that they are governed by the political elite, they have more contact with the ministerial advisers compared to the political elite. This could indicate that ministerial advisers are to a great extent mediating the contact between the political elite and the officials within the Swedish Government Offices.