The meritocratic principle—that public personnel should be selected based on competence rather than political loyalty, personal connections, or ascriptive characteristics—is a foundational normative benchmark in democratic governance. It is closely tied to efficiency, impartiality, and upholding legitimacy in democratic systems. While the macro-level benefits of institutionalized meritocracy are well-documented, we know less about how the principle functions in practice, particularly when it comes to internal career advancements.

This dissertation addresses this gap by analyzing whether promotions in Sweden’s local government bureaucracy reflect adherence to the meritocratic principle. Using individual-level administrative data, it examines the promotion outcomes of three groups—former political candidates, women, and immigrants—whose career advancement may be influenced by non-merit factors. Each essay investigates whether political connections, gender, or immigrant background affects promotion probabilities once a rich set of individual merit indicators is held constant.

Sweden’s local government bureaucracy offers a substantively important and analytically valuable setting for studying meritocracy in practice. Local governments play a central role in the Swedish welfare state and operate under strong normative expectations of impartial, competence-based staffing. At the same time, local staffing practices are lightly regulated, making adherence to meritocracy dependent on the practical exercise of discretion in personell decisions rather than on formal institutional safeguards.

The results show that former political candidates are more likely to be promoted than their colleagues, but this advantage is not driven by alignment with the ruling party, which is reassuring from the perspective of politicization. The findings also reveal a substantial promotion disadvantage for women that persists after accounting for merit, family situation, and policy sector, suggesting discrimination and a deviation from the meritocratic principle. For immigrants, the disadvantage for the whole group of first- and second-generation immigrants is modest, but a pronounced gap emerges for first-generation immigrants without Swedish upper-secondary education, raising concerns about exclusionary norms or bias in the recognition of credentials.

Taken together, the findings do not support an unequivocally positive assessment of internal promotions in Sweden’s local government bureaucracy. While the absence of partisan favoritism is encouraging, the disadvantages faced by women and by a specific subgroup of immigrants indicate that problematic personell practices may allow non-merit factors to influence advancement. More broadly, the results underscore that different forms of non-meritocratic selection can coexist within the same institutional setting, and that meritocracy must be evaluated not only in relation to formal procedures but also in terms of how merit is defined, assessed, and applied in practice.