Which civil servants are more responsive to political demands, and under what conditions? Using experimental survey data from 4,000 civil servants across 15 sectors and 271 municipalities in Spain and Sweden, we examine their responses to two distinct demands: willingness to violate impartiality and willingness to innovate. Our results reveal two key findings. First, ideologically aligned civil servants are more likely to violate the impartiality principle when on temporary contracts, but are less likely to do so when on permanent contracts. Importantly, these effects are only observed in Spain, not in Sweden, highlighting the role of the institutional context on administrative behavior. Second, a civil servant’s Public Service Motivation (PSM) affects attitudes toward innovation differently depending on the institutional context, too. In Spain, high-PSM civil servants are less willing to accept politicians’ demands to innovate a failing public service, while in Sweden, we observe the exact opposite: high-PSM individuals are more likely to accept politicians’ pressures to innovate. These dynamics point to how similar individual characteristics may result in widely different, even opposing, responses to political demands depending on the institutional context, with significant consequences for both the quality of public services and democratic governance.