Around the 2014 elections, Heraclitos Muhire noticed a potential conflict of interest as the outgoing government moved into high-level positions in the same sectors where they had previously decided to privatise and downsize.
"After having been in power for eight years, making cuts in the state and privatising state services, the same ministers moved on to important positions in the business sector in the same industry they helped privatise," he says.
The politicians' transitions to industries they had had political influence over were followed by accusations of personal gain. Former Minister for Finance Anders Borg moved to board positions in investment company Kinnevik and telecommunications firm Millicom. The former Stockholm County Councilor Filippa Reinfeldt went to the healthcare company Aleris. Former Liberal Party chairman Nyamko Sabuni joined the world of PR and communications and the tech consultancy corporation ÅF.
At the time, Muhire had just started studying the Bachelor's Programme in Criminology at Lund University. The conflict surrounding politicians' transitions to the business world later became the starting point of his master's thesis, in which he has a similar approach as in his doctoral dissertation.
The PhD project concerns the revolving doors between the political and private sectors. Revolving doors are a phenomenon in politics where staff move between roles as legislators or regulatory officials on the one hand and as members of the industries affected by the legislation on the other.
The history of revolving doors in Sweden can be linked to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s. Extensive deregulation, tax cuts and privatisation started a gradual merging of the political and economic elites.
Muhire's research focuses on the interaction between government and business in the regulation of career transitions. He intends to find out how common it is for civil servants to jump between private companies and politics and what socio-legal effects this has.
"It's about equality, rule of law and trust in public officials. It will be interesting to see which industries are looking for which civil servants."
In 2018, the Swedish Parliament passed a law to regulate the career changes of ministers and state secretaries to minimise the risk of conflicts of interest. The Board for the Examination of Ministers’ and State Secretaries’ Transitions was established with the mandate to decide on a twelve-month waiting period for civil servants who want to work in sectors in which they have had influence. An important detail is that they themselves apply and report their transitions to the Board. Muhire will examine how this revolving door regulation is applied by interviewing legislators and applicants. He points out that the quarantine board finds the system weak.
"The Board relies on the state secretaries' concern for their reputations, as an improper transition would have led to a lot of criticism in the media. Legislators rely on these mechanisms to stop any foul play, but the penalty for a transfer before the waiting period is only a written criticism."
He sees that a line of conflict arises when people with great competence and experience in public authority move to the private sector. There is a loss of competence for the public authority and competitive advantages for the industry.
"People think Sweden is fairly free of conflicts of interest and that everyone is doing the right thing," Muhire says. "Perhaps this is why this type of transition from government agencies to private industries is a grey area. This may also explain why there are so few studies on this topic in Sweden."