Sweden

At first sight, the Swedish Civil Service could well appear to consist entirely of professionals. Leafing through the Sveriges Statskalender, the enquirer notes some professional tag to almost every name. In practice, however, the distinction between professionals and generalists is readily understood. The Federation of Civil Servants stresses, for example, that its membership includes not only ‘salaried employees with purely administrative functions’ but also ‘officials with exacting duties in the technical field’ such as highways, research and public building. ¹ The generalists have hitherto been mainly recruited from graduates in law—the jurists, as they will be called in this report. ‘For general administration a legal training has on the whole always been preferred.’ ² This gives the Swedish legal profession a completely different structure from that of Great Britain. The young jurist has three main careers to choose between : the Civil Service, the judiciary, and private practice. The first of these is numerically the most important. Scales A and B comprehend the great majority of established, salaried civil servants, scale B being the more senior. It is note-worthy that, whereas the jurists constitute only 3·2 per cent of both scale-groups, and hold only 2·2 per cent of the relatively junior scale A posts, they fill almost a third (32 per cent) of the more senior scale B positions. There is some justification for this, both historical and functional. In the past, law was the only suitable course for the would-be administrator. Moreover, administrative work in Sweden consists largely in ‘finding out what is valid law and deciding on administrative appeals’. ¹