Public servants, anonymity, and political activity online: bureaucratic neutrality in peril?

Abstract

Various actors have recently expressed concern that by threatening anonymity, social media places the bureaucracy’s neutrality in jeopardy. Yet, empirically, little is known about the online political activities of public servants. Drawing upon the public service motivation literature, this article develops contrasting hypotheses between public sector employment and online political activity. Testing hypotheses with survey data from Canada, the results show that unionized public sector employment reduces the probability of being politically active online. As social media continues to change the nature of governance, the results suggest that anonymity and neutrality remain important professional norms within the Westminster administrative tradition, and are reflected in the online political activities of public sector employees in Canada. Points for practitioners • Due to its visibility and permanency, public servants’ political activity on social media potentially threatens their reputation as politically impartial officials. • Some governments and public sector unions have thus voiced messages of caution to administrative personnel about the dangers of being politically active online. • Survey data from Canada suggest that these messages have worked. • Unionized public sector employment reduces the probability of being politically active online but does not reduce the probability of being active in traditional “offline” political activities.