Bureaucrats in politics: a profile of the Swedish administrative elite3††

Abstract. In political systems composed of large and growing public bureaucracies, the attitudes of senior civil servants are extraordinarily significant, if little understood. This paper offers a preliminary view of the attitudes of more than 300 top-level Swedish administrators, based upon information gathered in 1971. Responses to 35 written questionnaire items suggest that upper-level Swedish bureaucrats are self-satisfied in evaluating their activities, independent in their thinking, and politically sophisticated. The same responses offer evidence of attitudes that structure the traditionally Swedish ‘art of compromise’ Intellectually, that art emphasizes particularistic thought patterns. Socially, it seems based on a pattern of limited commitment to official roles. Some implications of these patterns for both policy and process are suggested, along with some speculations concerning the future of the Swedish administrative system. Sommaire. Dans les systèmes politiques cornposés de bureaucraties de plus en plus importantes, les attitudes des hauts fonctionnaires sont extraordinairement significatives, encore que mal comprises. Cette communication offre une étude préliminaire des attitudes de plus de 300 cadres administratifs supérieurs suéois, sur la base de renseignements recueillis en 1971. Les réponses à 35 questions écrites laissent supposer que les bureaucrates suédois, au niveau supérieur, sont satisfaits de l'évaluation qu'ils font de leurs activités, qu'ils ont un esprit indépendant et qu'ils sont raffinés politiquement. Ces mêmes réponses indiquent des attitudes qui entérinent ‘l'art du compromis’ qui est, traditionnellement, très suédois. Intellectuellement, cet art accentue des façons de penser particularistes. Socialement, il semble basé sur un engagement limité vis-à-vis des rôes officiels. L'auteur propose à l'examen certaines implications de cet état d'esprit du point de vue des politiques et des processus ainsi que des spVculations sur l'avenir du système administratif suédois.     

Decay and Reconstruction In the Study of American Intergovernmental Relations

Current criticism of the performance of American governmentsis often organized around an emergent theory of intergovernmentaldecay, which contains propositions about government size, accountability,control, capacity and achievement among its central assertions.Recent evidence of American governmental performance is usedto appraise the decay theory, leading to the conclusion thatthe evidence offers little support for its major assertions.An alternative approach is then sketched out, based on the structuralconcept of "organizational interest" and the inherent dynamismof a system in which every governmental unit is always partof the relevant political environment of at least one otherunit. These considerations lead to a somewhat different assessmentof the "problems" facing American governments as well as analternative way of conceptualizing their activities.     

Confidence in Institutions in Post-Communist Societies: The Case of the Baltic States

The transition from totalitarian to democratic rule in the Baltic states raises the question of conditions for regime legitimacy and stability. The article focuses on the level of confidence people have in institutions after change of regime. The confidence in political and social institutions is at a surprisingly low level. The data suggest that people have more confidence in institutions producing symbols than they have in policy-making and implementing institutions. There is also evidence to show that leaders are more trusted than institutions as such. A survey of the potential background variables shows that people with higher education have lower confidence in institutions than the less well educated. But low confidence in institutions does not necessarily spell gloomy prospects for procedural democratic development, as long as the elites do have some popular support and the capacity for consensual integration.     

Unilateral Versus Multilateral International Sanctions: A Public Choice Perspective

Multilateral economic sanctions can be expected to impose greaterterms-of-trade effects on a target nation than unilateral sanctions. Yet despite their potential for greater economic damage, multilateral sanctions often are less effective in bringing about desired political results in the target. An interest-group model of endogenous policy suggests that multilateral sanctions can undermine the political effectiveness of opposition groups in the targetcountry, or strengthen those groups supporting the objectionable policy of the ruling regime. Such perverse effects are due in part to the inability of multilateral coalitions to enforce cooperation among members, and to the appropriation of sanctions rents in the target country. Unilateral sanctions, however, imposed by a country with close ties to the target, are ofteneffective in achieving their intended political objectives.     

Thinking the law with and against Luhmann,Legendre, Agamben

After the failure of all enterprises in legal ontology, and after the success of all enterprises in legal system internal theodicy, the field of legal theory is now open to receive a range of more complex, less universalist, less politicised, but also more personally shaped, more fragile suggestions. My article focusses on three such ways of dealing with the law question: the work of Pierre Legendre, a French psychoanalyst and specialist of the history of administrative law and Christian religion, the work of Niklas Luhmann, the recently deceased founder of a new German schoolof sociological systems theory, and that of Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher whose re-opening of the discussion on the Benjaminian notion of bare life and its relationship to law has provoked worldwide attention. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Quandary Concerning Immanence

A stationary eddy that constantly re-forms in the riverbed of the evolution of Western normative institutions, Legal Critique dates back, beyond modernity, to the beginning of the so-called Common Era. But critique also shapes the historical review of earlier phases of this evolution, and this not only as a method of the examination of sources, but also as a transferential displacement that tends to project into history the divides and aporias which define a present political situation. Unsurprisingly, this proceeding betrays more about current conceptions than it reveals about those of the past. The fate of the philosophical topic of immanence and transcendence and that of the proto-modern politics inaugurated by the distinction of God’s absolute versus ordered power offer a significant case in point. Certain critical orientations find in the long and complex history of these divides merely their own anticipated echo. Yet, the split between the adepts of an Aristotelian universe rooted in the being of the good and the followers of Spinoza, accustomed to absolute power and immanent causality, resists such simplifications and warrants a new examination.