From Public Service to Corporate Positions: A Critical Policy Analysis on Swedish Regulation of Public Officials Transitioning to Non-State Activities

Abstract: The topic of government and state officials leaving public service for the private sector has been a recurring talking point in the last decades with multiple countries in the OECD enacting different forms of regulation to contain potential conflicts of interest. In Sweden, legislation specifically regulating the phenomenon was not passed until 2018, when the Act Concerning Restrictions in the Event of Ministers and State Secretaries Transitioning to Non-state Activities (2018:676) (henceforth the Act) was enacted. The Act came with caveats such as the lack of sanctions in case of breach against the regulation as well as only limiting its legal subjects to ministers and state secretaries. This thesis investigates the problem representation that led to the provisions in the Act by conducting Bacchi & Goodwin’s (2016) policy analysis called What’s the Problem Represented to Be (WPR approach) on the legislative history of the Act. By employing Gramsci’s (1971) theoretical concepts of ideology and hegemony and Fisher’s (2009) capitalist realism, the thesis finds that the legislative history sees the issue of transitions between public and private sector as a problem if individuals misuse the otherwise positive exchange of information and knowledge between the public sector and private sector which could erode public trust in state institutions. The findings also indicate that the legislative history does not highlight the role of the private sector, e.g. major corporations, as a recruiter of ministers and state secretaries and that the legislative history delegates the state’s duties of enforcing the regulation to the legal subjects and to the media. The thesis concludes that the effects of corporate presence on the issue yet tacit omission in the legislative discourse could contribute to the increasing of blurring lines between the state and the private sectors.