Christopher A. Cooper (University of Ottawa)
The 21st century has witnessed a stark rise of populist ideology and political leaders. An essential feature of populism is that the bureaucracy—which inescapably elected governments must rely upon to govern—cannot be trusted (Bauer and Becker, 2020); bureaucrats, populists contend, are not impartial officials, but rather have their own partisan-bent. Specifically, in Canada, populists have voiced concerns that the federal bureaucracy is made-up of Liberal partisans. While impartiality is a core tenet of Canada’s bureaucracy, as private citizens, there are good reasons to believe that Canada’s federal bureaucrats likely have well-developed political opinions including their own partisan identity. Yet presently, no research in political science or public administration (Canadian or elsewhere) have investigated the partisan identity of public servants. Using survey data in Canada, this paper investigates the personal partisan identity of public servants working for the national, subnational and municipal levels of government as well as citizens working in the private and non-profit sectors. The results from ANOVA and OLS regression show that the partisan identity of national public servants is indeed substantively different than the partisan composition found within the citizenry. The findings raise important questions about the bureaucracy, impartiality, partisanship and democracy in the 21st century.