Christopher A. Cooper

University of Ottawa · School of Political Studies

Although approximately a quarter of the world's countries are officially bilingual or multilingual, the relationship between linguistic diversity and human resource management has largely been overlooked. This article advances research by theoretically considering, and empirically investigating, whether public servants' ability to use their officia...

While some hail social media as improving political participation, some governments have received social media with a touch of trepidation; concerned that public servants' online political activity might threaten the public service's reputed impartiality. Recent research from some Westminster countries where government messaging about social media...

Purpose As social media has become an ingrained aspect of our lives—including our political relationships with other citizens and the state—various governments have warned public servants that being politically active online might threaten the reputed impartiality of themselves and the public service. This study examines whether public servants are...

Research from parliamentary countries suggests that lobbyists tend to focus their attention on public office holders within the executive government more than those within the legislative branch. To date, however, research studying executive-lobbying relations tends to treat “the executive” and “lobbyists” as two homogenous groups. Yet importantly,...

Purpose For many, the claim that a new approach to bureaucracy—new political governance (NPG)—is underway reads as if it was written by Stephen King: Frightening fiction. While the thought of promiscuously partisan senior public servants publicly defending and promoting the government’s reputation to the demise of impartiality is disturbing, the ev...

Research shows that citizens' trust in government is associated with lower vaccine hesitancy and an increased willingness to follow public health measures. Thus far, however, the population health literature has largely conceptualized “government” as a unitary actor. This article furthers our understanding of this relationship by examining two impo...

Scholars of political blame suggest that architecture of government is shaped not only by considerations of efficiency, tradition, patronage or management "fashion"-but by the pre-emptive blame-avoidance tactics of leaders holding precarious public office. Delegation of contentious or failure-prone tasks to semi-autonomous bureaucracies (or "quango...

Although notoriously hierarchical, rigid and impersonal, bureaucracy has recently become the unsung hero in the fight against corruption. Recent studies suggest that countries whose public service reflects characteristics of a Weberian bureaucracy – particularly, permanent careers and merit recruitment – exhibit lower levels of corruption. Uncertai...

In one of earliest empirical studies of lobbying in Canada, Robert Presthus remarked with surprise that some MPs believed that “‘lobbying’ just did not exist in Canada” (1971: 445). Now, more than fifty years since Presthus’ study, not even the most passive onlooker of politics would dare deny the existence of lobbying in Canada, nor for that matte...

The Phoenix pay system has been mired by an unending string of problems negatively affecting hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and costing billions of dollars to fix. This article studies whether Phoenix’s negative consequences might also be weakening a core component of good governance: a permanent public service. Using data from the 2017 Publi...

This article introduces readers to the Lobbying and Democratic Governance in Canada (LDGC) research project. We describe the project’s origins and objectives as well as the types of information within the LDGC dataset, including data gathered from one of the most comprehensive and systematic lobbying registries in the world. We then review the meth...

Depuis quelque temps, les réseaux sociaux préoccupent divers acteurs, qui craignent qu’en menaçant l’anonymat, ces réseaux mettent en danger la neutralité de la bureaucratie. Toutefois, les données empiriques sur l’activité politique en ligne des fonctionnaires sont peu nombreuses. Dans cet article, en nous appuyant sur la littérature consacrée à l...

Many scholars lament that reforms first introduced in the late 1970s led to the demise of the Westminster administrative tradition. A recent body of research, however, has begun to question the death of the Westminster administrative tradition. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on an important tenet of this tradition: the permanen...

Fearing that public servants’ reputation for impartiality may decline if they are politically active on social media, many governments have recently produced guidelines limiting the political rights of bureaucrats to be active online. Despite the seriousness of these restrictions, we presently know very little about public sector employees’ online...

The extent to which new governments appoint and dismiss senior public servants is widely claimed to be influenced by their country’s underlying administrative tradition. This is particularly the case within the Westminster tradition where such turnover is limited in nature, with most appointees coming from within the ranks of the public service. Th...

Unlike most public servants, top administrators–those who manage thousands of personnel and oversee millions of dollars in public spending–are appointed by the head of government. At the Pleasure of the Crown is a detailed exploration of this central but overlooked aspect of governing. Christopher A. Cooper analyzes the appointment of deputy minist...

It is frequently claimed within the politicization literature that while governments around the world are increasingly politicizing senior public service appointments, the nature and extent of this politicization varies across administrative traditions. To date, however, differences across administrative traditions have received little empirical sc...

Recent research suggests that there are two different types of lobbyists: those specializing in providing access to their personal connections with public office holders, and those specializing in a particular policy sector. This article advances this research by examining the actual behaviour of consultant lobbyists with data gathered from the Can...

Does political uncertainty affect whether lobbyists contact government officials? We suggest that the answer depends on the type of uncertainty introduced. Distinguishing between policy objective uncertainty—where organized interests and lobbyists are uncertain about the policy intentions of decision makers—and issue information uncertainty—where p...

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 sec...

Recruiting civil servants on the basis of merit is believed to improve the quality of governance because it increases the bureaucracy’s expertise, leads bureaucrats to develop distinct preferences and encourages them to candidly voice their opinions to others. Yet, to date, the reason why merit recruitment positively affects employee voice remains...

Whether there has been a centralisation of power towards the first minister and her entourage of courtiers during the 20th century is a contentious issue among scholars of parliamentary systems. A principle reason for the endurance of this debate is the absence of empirical indicators that can be compared over time. This article contributes to this...

The various ways which federalism influences gender policies has recently received a surge of academic interest. This article contributes to this literature by moving beyond formally adopted policies to study the influence of federalism on social learning amongst women's organizations. Using a most-likely case study design, this exploratory work tr...

This article develops the concept of executive style to explore how variations in the relationships between politicians, career civil servants, and political appointees affect the types of policy outputs. A comparative analysis of home care policies in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia finds that the former’s civil service executive style – where profe...

The various ways which federalism influences gender policies has recently received a surge of academic interest. This article contributes to this literature by moving beyond formally adopted policies to study the influence of federalism on social learning amongst women's organizations. Using a most-likely case study design, this exploratory work tr...

Explanations of politicization tend to focus on historical trends, administrative traditions, and government preferences. Absent from this literature are the actions of bureaucrats themselves. Drawing on theories of employee resistance from organization studies suggesting that changes threatening the financial security and professional identity of...