Amalie Trangbæk - Research

My research focus on civil servants and ministries. I have particular experience with studying the executive triangle in Denmark, i.e. the interplay between permanent secretaries, ministerial advisors, and ministers.

You can find a description of my research projects below. Concurrently, I am a part of various other projects. The results from these will be added as they are published.

I specialize in interviews and ethnographic methods, including shadowing and participant observation. During my PhD, I shadowed permanent secretaries—the highest-ranking civil servants in the ministries—and complemented this with elite interviews with top civil servants and ministers. In The Civil Service from Within, I launched the project by working full-time as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance for six months. I am currently conducting interviews with civil servants across 13 ministries and various levels of seniority to follow up on my employment in the ministry.

Thus, I have been sole responsible for extensive qualitative data collections for two research projects where I myself collected all data, including conducting +120 interviews (mostly elite interviews), doing 300 hours of shadowing, and 6 months of participant observation. On top of that comes interviews conducted as a part of other projects.

I strongly believe the method should fit the research question. Thus, I employ a broad range of methods when studying various aspects of the civil service and ministries. For instance, I have also conducted sequence analysis to study career patterns, which teach us about how the trending logic changes over time: from emphasizing professional specialists to process generalists. I also have experience conducting surveys.

If you want to follow my work, you can add me through the icons below.

Photographer: Brage Borup

The Civil Service from within

2024 - 2026

Civil servants constitute the core of our democracy despite not being democratically elected. Politicians are dependent on their interplay with the civil service: on the civil servants preparation of bills, reforms & speeches, on the practical development of political ideas to tangible policy etc. While there are some solid, theoretical notions about the civil servant behavior, we need to know more about the practical performance and the reasoning behind their behaviour.

The aim of this project is to investigate what happens ‘behind the scenes’ in the ministries, including the behavior of civil servants and the civil servants’ own reasoning about their behavior. Hence, the project investigates two main questions: What constitutes the ministerial practices and the roles of civil servants? Why do civil servants behave in that way?

Knowing more about these themes will enable a more informed discussion about the role of civil servants in general (e.g. would it be helpful to have more formally politicized employees?), how information is utilized, and the impact of the organization of the ministries, both within a given ministry and across ministries.

I launched the project by working full-time as a civil servant (specialkonsulent) in the Ministry of Finance for six months. I then arranged and conducted interviews with civil servants in 10 different ministries. I interviewed civil servants with little experience (less than 6 months) to very experienced civil servants (more than 25 years of employment). I interviewed at all levels in the departments in the ministries including permanent secretaries (departementschefer), ministerial advisors (særlige rådgivere), and ministers. I have formally interviewed +85 civil servants on top of the on-the-go interviews and informal conversations that have deepened my understanding of the inner workings of the ministries.

The project has received three small grants from Department of Political Science, Aarhus University on ~130.000 DKK in total. The project runs from 2024-2026. It is a solo project.

Comparative Research on the Executive Triangle (CoREx)

2023-2027

CoREx fosters knowledge sharing across Europe and facilitates the collection of comparative data. The aim is to develop a unified conceptual and methodological framework to study relationships of executive politicians, top civil servants, and ministerial advisers (also known as ‘the executive triangle’).

By bridging gaps in research on top civil servants and ministerial advisers, as well as addressing disparities in geographical coverage and research capacity, CoREx connects previously fragmented studies. The project will produce comparative datasets and analyses on institutional structures, career trajectories, roles and interactions in policymaking, and the accountability and transparency of the executive triangle across regions and over time. Importantly, CoREx introduces innovative, systematic insights into the trends, causes, and consequences of different executive triangle configurations. Through these efforts, CoREx enhances our understanding of democratic governance, particularly in the context of growing political polarization and populism.

CoREx is a COST Action running from 2023-2027. The funding received by COST supports the creation and maintenance of a pan-European network of researchers. However, it does not fund the research itself. Thurid Hustedt is the Action Chair and Tobias Bach is the Action Vice Chair. I am part of the COST Action core team and co-chair of working group 3 with Stine Hesstvedt and Erik-Jan van Dorp. Working Group 3 focuses on studying roles and interactions in the executive triangle during policymaking through interviews. I am also a member of Working Group 1 studying the formal, institutional setup.

Read more about CoREx here: https://www.cost-corex.com/

Bureaucrats Responses to Accountability in Central Government (BRACGo)

2024 - 2026

We saw it in the child-bride case (Instrukssagen), the mink case (minksagen) and recently in the Elbit case (Elbitsagen): Intensified accountability demands means that bureaucrats in central government are increasingly ‘dragged out’ of their anonymous lives in the shadow of the ministerial responsibility, where they used to live in a not-too-distant past. Accountability is crucial for the legitimacy of democratic governments. Therefore, this project investigates whether and how accountability demands are reflected in the minds and behaviours of individual bureaucrats in Danish central government organizations.

The project is funded by a NOVA grant from Aarhus University Research Fund for the period 2024-2026, and I work together with Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen. The grant is on ~500.000 DKK.

Life at the top: Understanding top bureaucrats' roles as the link between politics and administration

2017 - 2021

Top civil servants act in the nexus between bureaucracy and politics. They connect the political and the administrative levels and are thus close collaborators of both politicians and civil servants. When they provide advice and assist their minister, they influence decisions and thereby society and citizens’ everyday life. Although top civil servants are ubiquitous in politics, we know little about their work life. This dissertation therefore sets out to explore their practices and roles. It focuses on the highest-ranking civil servants in Denmark – permanent secretaries – and draws on theories about top civil servants’ roles, behavior and skills. Using an abductive logic of inquiry, the author shadows eight permanent secretaries and interviews permanent secretaries, ministers and heads of section. The analysis is divided into four parts investigating the imperatives of permanent secretaries and their relations upwards, downwards and outwards. The dissertation provides a nuanced perspective on what permanent secretaries actually do. It illustrates how they navigate between several practices and roles, and points to five characteristic practices: cohering, connecting, coordinating, delegating and protecting along with three overall roles: being the minister’s right hand, advisor and CEO of the ministry. Furthermore, the dissertation contributes to the theoretical debate about top civil servants by stating that permanent secretaries resemble stewards more than agents and that there seems to be a continuously changing relation between top civil servants and politicians.

This is my PhD project funded by Aarhus University 2017-2021. It was a solo project.

You can read the PhD here.