1 Introduction: Populists, Democratic
Backsliding, and Public
Administration
michael w. bauer, b. guy peters, jon
pierre, kutsal yesilkagit, and stefan
becker
Liberal democracy is at risk. Its ascent since the Second World War has
recently come to a halt. Once considered to be the only political game in
town, the fate of liberal democracy is growing more uncertain as actual
and aspiring authoritarians have begun to undermine its hallmark
institutions. Political pluralism, separation of powers, and rule of law
are increasingly called into question. The “end of history,” implying
the exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism
(Fukuyama 1989; 2006), has failed to come closer in recent years.
Instead, liberal democracy is contested as it has not been since 1945.
Two trends contribute to liberal democracy’s current stagnation. On
the one hand, many authoritarian regimes – China above all, but also
many Middle Eastern and African states – have not faltered, as modernization
theories once predicted. Rather, they have proven resilient,
even in the face of external and internal pressure. On the other hand,
many democracies, both old and new, have seen authoritarian backlashes.
While almost complete collapses of democracy, such as in
Venezuela, remain exceptions, governments in countries such as
Turkey, Hungary, and Poland have implemented far-reaching illiberal
reforms – hollowing out their democratic institutions. Even the United
States, one of the most robust liberal democracies, has witnessed
authoritarian dynamics with President Trump. In many other
Western states, too, liberal democracy is under siege, as authoritarianminded
parties shift political discourses and thereby influence policies,
or even enter government and implement illiberal reforms.
Many of these current processes of liberal-democratic backsliding
are driven by populism. A rather controversial term in political practice,
populism can be understood as “a thin-centred ideology that
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considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and
antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and
which argues that politics should be an expression of the [general will]
of the people” (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, p. 6). The relationship
between populism and liberal democracy is complex; in some
circumstances, such as in autocratic regimes, populist movements can
boost democratic politics by opening the political playing field for
actors formerly excluded or underrepresented. Ultimately, however,
populism is incompatible with modern notions of liberal democracy.
As Müller (2016a, pp. 19–20) argues, populism is a “a particular
moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political
world that sets a morally pure and fully unified . . . people against elites
who are deemed corrupt or in some way morally inferior.” Following
this logic, populist ideologies are not only anti-elitist, but also antipluralist
and, as such, illiberal. Some also see explicitly authoritarian
elements increasingly blended into many, if not most, forms of contemporary
populist ideologies (Norris and Inglehart 2019).
Liberal-democratic backsliding and the role of populism have
attracted much scholarly attention in recent years (see, e.g., Galston
2018; Krastev 2017; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018a; Luce 2017; Manow
2018; Mounk 2018; Zielonka 2018). However, while knowledge on
the sources, variants and consequences of backsliding processes is
accumulating, one central aspect of policymaking remains neglected:
public administration. Much scholarship focuses on populist politicians
breaking rules of political discourse, attacking the media and, if
they enter government, obstructing the courts and interfering with
elections. Yet how they approach the state bureaucracy features less
prominently. This omission creates a peculiar void in the debate on
liberal-democratic backsliding and populism, for bureaucracies are
crucial in preparing and implementing policies. As Max Weber
(1978, p. 220) wrote, “the exercise of authority consists precisely in
administration.”
Against this empirical and theoretical background, this volume
addresses the administrative dimension of liberal-democratic backsliding
with a focus on populist governments. It studies public administrations
as both objects and subjects in the backsliding process. For this
purpose, the volume brings together country case studies and crosscutting
analyses. The contributions combine theoretical and empirical
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work, providing the first truly comparative perspective on liberaldemocratic
backsliding, populism, and public administration.
The rationale for this undertaking is twofold. First, as already indicated,
the volume fills an empirical void. We currently know little about
administrative policies of populist governments, although there are
ample hints that the recent wave of populism also involves transforming
public administration. Many populists, for instance, are currently
engaging in the rewriting of the “operational manual” of the state
(Müller 2016a). These efforts cannot stop short of the state bureaucracy.
Furthermore, in those cases where populists must still face
credible elections, they seek to deliver on policy promises – an effort
that is doomed to fail without the backup of the administrative machinery.
Much dynamism is therefore to be expected when incoming populist
politicians interact with established state bureaucracies, but most
studies focus on alterations in the systems of checks and balances and
tend to neglect public administration. This volume thus explores an
overlooked aspect of one of the most important contemporary political
trends – that is, democratic backsliding.
Second, the volume builds bridges between different strands of
scholarship, which have remained rather insulated so far. It complements
the debate on system transformation and democracy with
administrative aspects, which it has long neglected. While there is
a rich body of literature that deals with the causes, conditions, and
consequences of liberal-democratic ascent and breakdown, most
research has focused on macrolevel associations. It has thus paid little
attention to the extent to which bureaucracies were objects and subjects
in transformation processes. This volume offers one path to integrate
public administration aspects in system transformation research
by eliciting the role of bureaucracies in reform projects of populist
governments. At the same time, it brings questions of democracy
back to the Public Administration community, which has long favored
studying issues of management and efficiency. It addresses the place
and role of bureaucracy in democracy through the lens of recent
backsliding dynamics. Also, the gathered knowledge on strategies and
pathways of illiberal public administration policies employed by populist
governments can offer advice on how to make the bureaucracy less
penetrable to authoritarian tendencies.
This introduction lays the theoretical and conceptual groundwork. It
first reviews broader debates on system transformation and public
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administration, showing that the repertoire to study the administrative
dimensions of liberal-democratic backsliding is currently meager. It
then identifies three areas of inquiry, outlining expectations and propositions
for the empirical case studies. These areas are the general
governance concepts of populist politicians, their strategies for administrative
reform and the potential reactions of the bureaucracy. Taken
together, these areas provide a comprehensive framework for studying
the administrative dimensions of liberal-democratic backsliding.
Background: System Transformation, Democracy,
and Public Administration
Understanding the conduct of populist governments in liberaldemocratic
settings could, in theory, greatly benefit from system transformation
research, which has generated plenty of knowledge on
democratic ascent and breakdown. Most of this research, however,
focuses on macrolevel associations, building on Lipset’s (1959) insights
on modernization theory, and perhaps best exemplified by the study of
Przeworski et al. (2000). It thus pays little attention to state administrations.
Some studies have illuminated administrative issues, such as
the phenomenon of bureaucratic authoritarianism as a variant of autocratic
rule (Collier 1979) or the bureaucracy’s role in the transition of
Eastern European states after the fall of the Iron Curtain (Baker 2002).
Yet these studies hardly add up to a comparative perspective on
bureaucracies.
With a limited recognition of public administration, system transformation
research follows the path of much thinking on democracy,
wherein civil liberties, political competition, and fair elections lie at the
core. The historical trajectory of system transformation research may
explain this narrow view. The focus has long been on the shift away
from authoritarian regimes and toward democratic rule.
Democratization starts with greater societal organization, freer political
competition, fairer elections, and so forth. These processes happen
far from the bureaucracy, which instead remains dominated by an
authoritarian executive until democratic transition in the other arenas
has been successful. It follows that the bureaucracy is usually the
natural stronghold of the autocratic leadership in power, and it is of
little concern to transformation theorists interested in regime change
toward democracy. However, analyzing transitions from democracy to
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authoritarianism is likely to need a more bureaucracy-centered perspective,
as modern democracies feature highly entangled politicoadministrative
relations. It is also plausible that democratic public
administration is among the first institutions subject to backsliding
pressures from authoritarian-minded politicians. For these reasons,
a stronger focus on the state bureaucracy could benefit transformation
research.
If scholars were to direct their attention toward bureaucratic aspects,
they would have difficulty finding appropriate concepts and operationalizations
for their purposes, however. Whereas literature on democratization
has mostly disregarded the bureaucracy, much scholarship
on public administration has avoided issues of democracy. These
research strands thus implicitly agree that such issues belong to the
“political” rather than the “administrative” domain. Indeed, for much
public administration literature, threats of democratic backsliding
regarding the bureaucracy are irrelevant; by contrast, they perceive
the hierarchical character and culture of bureaucratic organization as
an impediment to democratic governance. The bureaucracy’s comprehensive
power is feared as being susceptible to escaping political control
and turning citizens into underlings to anonymous rule (Durant
and Ali 2012, p. 278), or perceived as overproducing public goods for
its own organizational aggrandizement (Niskanen 1971). From this
perspective, political control of the bureaucracy has utmost priority,
and elected politicians should determine the direction according to
which the bureaucracy must act. The underlying dichotomy of politics
and administration remains a prominent analytical anchor, in particular
for model-based, quantitative political science scholarship (Shepsle
and Bonchek 2007), which focuses on idealized control and applies
formal principal–agent analysis (Weingast 1984).
Other approaches, however, challenge this view. They apply bottomup
perspectives based on case studies to disentangle what undergirds
the conduct of bureaucracy (Meier and O’Toole 2006, p. 12). This
research strand perceives interactions between politicians and the bureaucracy
as multifaceted and complex; regularly, they are more
a matter of negotiation or collaboration than of top-down command
and control. This approach does not render questions of political
control irrelevant, but it emphasizes the democratic quality of the
bureaucracy itself. As public administration constitutes a component
of modern government, it must also be organized along some
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democratic guidelines. In the words of Dwight Waldo, who advocated
this point of view, it is just not credible to claim that “autocracy during
working hours is the price to be paid for democracy after hours”
(Waldo 1952, p. 87).
Studies on bureaucracies provide empirical evidence as to why disregarding
the bureaucracy renders discussions about democracy incomplete.
The policymaking impact of administrations has been elicited in
studies about implementation (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984), streetlevel
bureaucracy (Lipsky 2010), representative bureaucracy (Meier
1993), coproduction (Bovaird 2007), networks, governance and bureaucratic
interest intermediation (Lehmbruch 1991; O’Toole 1997),
and administrative input in the preparation of laws – to name only
a few prominent examples. Furthermore, the link between administrative
capacities and the legitimation of the state (Suleiman 2013) suggests
a much more complex relationship between public administration
and democracy than system transformation debates and standard political
science have hitherto acknowledged (Denhardt and Denhardt
2002). However, while these and other contributions have generated
much systematic knowledge on many bureaucratic phenomena, they
have hardly addressed issues of system transformation – regarding
neither democratization nor democratic backsliding. Furthermore,
they have barely been translated into democratic terms at all. While
studies on accountability, citizen participation, and corresponding
topics soared, they have rarely benefited debates on either democracy
or system transformation.
The study of administrative dimensions of liberal-democratic backsliding
can therefore build on a broad literature base, but it must still
develop its own conceptual repertoire. System transformation research
and Public Administration provide elements that must be ordered and
synthesized, before being put to the empirical test.
Agenda: Studying the Administrative Dimensions
of Liberal-Democratic Backsliding
Liberal-democratic backsliding is a complex, multidimensional process
that can be approached from many different viewpoints. This section
develops a framework for studying its administrative dimensions. It
first discusses the broader governance concepts of recent illiberal sentiment,
particularly in the guise of populism, before reflecting on its
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repertoire of specific reforms to transform the bureaucracy. Because
administrations are no mere objects of political initiatives, this section
also discusses concepts to capture the reactions of the civil service
toward the new populist leadership. First, however, a few clarifications
on the term “democratic backsliding” are in order.
Democratic Backsliding
Democratic backsliding has become a fashionable topic of debate in
the last decade, but its precise meaning is often unclear. This volume
follows Bermeo’s (2016) use of the concept that captures, as coups
d’états and revolutions become rarer, the more clandestine ways of
undermining democracy. This backsliding includes harassment of the
opposition, censorship of the media, and subversion of horizontal
accountability, but it also shows itself in “executive aggrandizement”
(Bermeo 2016, p. 10; see also Coppedge et al. 2018). This specific use
of the concept has been criticized on normative and analytical
grounds. As to the former, the concept implicitly defines democracy
as liberal. Many understandings of democracy are more nuanced (see,
e.g., the five dimensions of the Varieties of Democracy project
(Lührmann et al. 2020): deliberative, egalitarian, electoral, liberal,
participatory), and the broad notion of liberalism itself has drawn
plenty of criticism. Accordingly, debates on what counts as democratic
backsliding are often heated. While acknowledging different
interpretations of democracy, this volume restricts its analysis to the
liberal one, which takes a negative view of the concentration of
political power and emphasizes the importance of civil rights and
the rule of law, as well as checks and balances (see Coppedge et al.
2018). The normative premise is that, without some liberalism, other
dimensions of democracy will also suffer, whereas the pragmatic
reasoning is that, in a vast field of empirical developments, the analysis
must start somewhere. The initial focus on liberal democracy can
and should later be expanded.
The concept of democratic backsliding has also been criticized on
analytical grounds: for its imprecision, implicit automatism and missing
agency (who or what drives this process); its subjective starting
point (deteriorations in authoritarian regimes do not seem to be
included); and its lack of measurement strategies and reliable data.
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These analytical problems lend weight to suspicions that the empirical
phenomenon might not be as relevant as portrayed. The existence of
a “third wave of autocratization” (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019) has,
however, been empirically substantiated. While claims of the end of
liberal democracies (Diamond 2016; Runciman 2018) appear exaggerated,
“the deterioration of qualities associated with democratic governance,
within any regime” is apparent (Waldner and Lust 2018, p. 8).
This volume thus acknowledges the conceptual problems associated
with the concept of democratic backsliding, but still uses it as a starting
point, hoping to contribute to its further development by bringing in
administrative factors.
General Approaches to the Bureaucracy
As acknowledged earlier, the voting of populist parties and politicians
into government does not represent democratic backsliding;
rather, it depends on their conduct in office. While governing always
entails randomness and situational activity, governments, no matter
their outlook, face a few general choices on how to govern. Their
answers precede any specific policy preferences; they define how
politicians in government see their role in relationship to other institutions.
These governance concepts are crucial in understanding the
dynamics after a new government enters office – and all the more so
in cases of illiberal governments winning elections in liberal settings,
given the presumably stark difference in governance approaches.
Regarding the institution of interest here – public administration –
politicians have three general choices after entering government: sidelining,
ignoring or using the bureaucracy (see also Peters and Pierre
2019). Each of those can, however, entail unintended side effects.
In the first scenario, the government is reluctant to use the established
bureaucracy. This unwillingness is, for instance, in line with the general
populist dichotomy of the virtuous elite versus the corrupt elite. The
public bureaucracy is, very clearly, part of the elite in capital cities, and
therefore is a natural target for rejection and avoidance on the part of
populist politicians. The sidelining of the bureaucracy may come
through various forms of patronage (for options, see Peters 2013).
Depending upon the nature of the administrative system, an incoming
president or prime minister may be able to appoint hundreds,
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sometimes even thousands, of officials to replace incumbent officials.
While this may be common practice, the style of patronage appointments
may change: the appointments may move from being largely
technically qualified individuals who can work easily with a qualified
public bureaucracy to more politicized officials with few qualifications
other than their political connections to the leadership.
Another option for populist politicians attempting to “occupy”
the state is to construct alternative structures that complement or
substitute for the work of the career public service. The Executive
Office of the President in the United States is, for instance, a readymade
opportunity for this approach, and only needs to be occupied
by populist loyalists to have a parallel structure to the bureaucracy.
But other political systems that have had a more respected senior
civil service have had leaders create such advisory structures for
their political leadership. The Trump administration in the United
States has made several moves to undermine the independence of the
civil service and to politicize appointments in the federal government.
These have included a gradual downsizing of the service
through attrition, removing some protections against dismissals,
and significantly undermining the powers of labor unions at the
federal level.
A third alternative for sidelining the established bureaucracy is to
adopt a technocratic solution to governing. Somewhat paradoxically,
although populists may argue that elites are inherently corrupt, at least
some American populists have attempted to involve experts, whether
from within the bureaucracy or from outside. For example, Charles
Postel (2007) has pointed to a “populist vision” of governing in which
professional, businesslike solutions would substitute for the presumed
incompetence of the politicians. This version of sidelining the bureaucracy
tends to assume that more than being venial, the public bureaucracy
fits the familiar stereotype of bureaucracy as lazy and
incompetent. This leads to a vision of governing through creative,
innovative and committed employees brought in from outside the
“system.” The recommendations of populist political leaders for the
professionalization were roughly coterminous with the progressive
movement’s similar recommendations for improving governance.
This vision of technocratic governance has been very evident in Latin
American governments, especially those with relatively low levels of
party system institutionalization (Mainwaring, Bizarro, and Petrova
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2018). In these cases, the absence of expertise within government has
led to the use of experts, often tied to individual political leaders, but in
other cases with strong ties to a political party (Panizza, Peters, and
Ramos 2019).
The second option for incoming governments is to ignore the established
bureaucracy. Their rationale could stem from different reasons.
One the one hand, political leaders coming into office may simply not
be interested in governing; on the other hand, as in the case of Donald
Trump (and many other populists), they may think they can govern
more personally and with their cronies rather than through the apparatus
of government. Many populist leaders tend to assume (often quite
rightly) that the establishment is opposed to them and revert to governing
through a smaller coterie of friends and advisers.
Paradoxically, this governance approach is likely to empower the
bureaucracy. Despite the politicians’ indifference, government will
have to go on somehow. The absence of effective leadership and direction
from the top may enable some form of “bureaucratic government”
to appear, in direct contradiction to the intentions of politicians who
wanted to “drain the swamp.” This is analogous to the observations
made at the time of extreme political instability in France and Italy that
left the bureaucracy effectively in charge (Diamant 1968). Populist
politicians may focus on a few policy domains, such as immigration
and environmental regulation, and leave much of the rest of government
unattended. Some civil servants may even engage in “guerilla
government” (O’Leary 2006; Olsson 2016). While this is the stereotype
of the role of bureaucracies held by many populists (as well as by
others on the extreme right and left), public servants may believe their
only reasonable option is to resist in place. Thus, the lack of concern of
many populists with the bureaucracy – other than to denigrate it – may
undermine their agenda. Such undermining may not be so much outright
sabotage as the continuing daily tasks of public administrators to
administer the laws that are on the books already. Rhetoric and anger
will be insufficient to tame the administrative state. Without a clear
strategy for controlling and remodeling the bureaucracy, the governance
capacity of any illiberal regime will be limited.
The third option for populist politicians entering government is to
use the bureaucracy. Roberto Michels argued (1915) that when socialist
parties won power in government they had in fact lost. His argument
was that, once in power, the principles of equality and shared power
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that had been their political leitmotiv would necessarily be abandoned
when the leaders of the party took office and had to govern. Even if not
enamored by the trappings of power, these party leaders would be
captured by the need to govern and would become different from
other members of the socialist movement. The same sort of capture
and oligarchic change may occur for populist politicians who gain
office and then are confronted with fulfilling the promises for governance
and policy they made while campaigning. Governance is not easily
produced, especially when the agenda is to undo much of what has been
done before, and the individuals attempting to make the transformation
are themselves often inexperienced and lack knowledge about
procedures, as well as about substance. Unlike the aforementioned
sidelining scenario, however, their desire to govern may overcome
their ideological distaste for the insiders of the public sector, so they
will begin to rely on the career bureaucracy.
This scenario may appeal more to the strongly authoritarian versions
of populism than to the more contemporary democratic versions from
the political right. If authoritarians with a populist inclination also
want to exert control over the society, they may well need the bureaucracy
(including the uniformed bureaucracy in the form of the military)
to have any success. The need to govern may especially place the
electoral authoritarians in something of a dilemma, risking losing
their electoral base either by failure to deliver or by being seen to be
cooperating too much with the elites in the national capital. The
attempts of a populist government to cooperate, and co-opt, the existing
bureaucracy may put that bureaucracy into something of a dilemma
also. On the one hand, those bureaucrats may want to maintain their
control over the machinery of government, and may therefore be
willing to go along with the program of the populist regime to maintain
that power. They may also believe that it is their task to serve any
government that is selected by legitimated means, even ones that
appear to regard them, the permanent administrators, as anathema.
But the populist ideal of more democratic recruitment to public office
may not be entirely practical, given the demands of modern governing.
If the administration wants an effective government, even one dedicated
to dismantling much of government, it will need to draw on the
same group of educated elites that are assumed to be the problem.
Thus, finding some mode of accommodation between the antisystemic
goals of populist rhetoric and the need to govern presents a major
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challenge for both the political and the bureaucratic aspects of
government.
Understanding the administrative implications of liberal-democratic
backsliding thus begins with understanding what politicians wish to
accomplish in general, and what this entails for the state bureaucracy in
particular. This task can be challenging. Many political agendas are
complicated, with discourse often being different from behavior.
Furthermore, recent populist surges are driven by new movements,
parties, and actors, who often have not yet consolidated their agendas.
Their conduct may therefore be contradictory. What may seem as
a deliberate attempt to sabotage the state bureaucracy may, for
instance, sometimes simply be a collective action problem on behalf
of the government. The first step necessary in analyzing populist public
administration initiatives is thus the careful estimation of governance
concepts.
Strategies for Illiberal Administrative Reform
Depending on their general governance concepts, different administrative
options materialize for incoming governments. If they seek to
sideline the established bureaucracy, they may design new institutions
from scratch. But even if they decide to use the established bureaucracy,
they must not resign themselves to accepting its current organization.
Rather, they can engage in molding the administration into
new illiberal forms. The rise of fascism in Europe in the early twentieth
century provides some insights on possible pathways. Admittedly,
such retrospective accounts have limits in their comparability with
current developments. Present-day populists are no fascists, and current
democracies appear more solid than the young republics of the
early twentieth century that succumbed to totalitarianism.
Nevertheless, the shared disdain for pluralism makes the administrative
policies of the fascist era relevant for current times. The following
illustrations are drawn from authoritative works on Italy (Bach and
Breuer 2010), Germany (Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz 1962; Caplan
1988; Reichardt and Seibel 2011), Portugal (Costa Pinto 2004;
Madureira 2007; Schmitter 1975) and Austria (Tálos and
Manoschek 2005). When these young democracies crumbled, fascist
rulers also transformed public administration. Five main lines of
action are evident.
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First, incoming authoritarian rulers sought to alter administrative
structures. A common attempt was to reduce autonomy in what was
usually a vertically and horizontally differentiated system. In effect,
the new rulers sought to centralize the bureaucracy. Because even
authoritarian leaders cannot build new bureaucratic structures from
scratch, at least not in the short-term, change was incremental. The
new rulers sought to disempower established organizations by creating
new ones, planting new units in traditional bureaucracies, and
transferring power to parts of the administrative system more ideologically
consolidated and responsive to the wishes of the new leadership.
Second, organizational realignment could also be realized
through redistributing resources. In this case, budget and personnel
allocations reshuffled administrative powers, while the formal set-up
remained intact. Third, the new rulers aimed at influencing administrative
personnel. Purges of staff and top bureaucrats occurred eventually,
albeit to different degrees. Following large-scale dismissals,
the new rulers often inserted ideological supporters into positions of
strategic importance to consolidate their nascent executive power.
Such appointments went beyond normal spoils behavior in that the
very rules and procedures of recruitment and career progression were
often reformed to produce a lasting personnel effect. Fourth, the
incoming authoritarian leadership sought to overhaul bureaucratic
norms. They tried to establish an administrative culture that framed
critique as disobedience and suppressed dissenting opinions. In effect,
bureaucrats were expected to be loyal to the new, charismatic leadership,
not to institutions or constitutions. Fifth, European fascist
regimes famously manifested their antipluralism through extensive
use of executive decree, which sidelined legislative bodies and representative
deliberation. The effect of such measures was
a reconfiguration of power that granted total authority to the executive
and silenced external pressures.
These illiberal strategies are valid primers for what might be
employed today. However, public administration has undergone
some transformation in the last century. One important trend has
been increasing openness and accountability. Institutionalized
access for civil society organizations, consultations with citizens,
transparency laws, and increased media scrutiny have put bureaucracies
under stronger external control. Parliaments have also professionalized,
allowing for better scrutiny of the executive branch.
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The pluralist implications of these developments must trouble
populist politicians in government. Bearing this in mind, the historical
cues can be developed into five dimensions of populist
public administration policies (see also Bauer and Becker 2020).
In each dimension, different strategies are available to transform
the bureaucracy:
• Structure: Centralizing formal power by strengthening top-down
command and control in central government, reducing horizontal
power dispersion and restricting lower-level and agency autonomy,
where it constitutes a counterweight to central government.
• Resources: Steering administrative conduct through allocation of
funds as well as administrative and informational resources – for
instance, weakening specific units by reducing funds and staff numbers,
leaving them out of information loops, or impairing their work
by imposing excessive administrative demands.
• Personnel: Ideological cleansing of staff by intensifying patronage in
recruitment and career progression beyond “normal” spoils behavior,
while weakening meritocratic and representative factors in personnel
policy through excessive exhaustion of available or
introduction of new politicization instruments.
• Norms: Completely committing the administrative culture to the
new ideological order by undermining the official neutrality of the
bureaucracy or emphasizing its instrumental character through, for
instance, exercising informal pressure on staff.
• Accountability: Reducing the societal participation and responsibilities
of service agencies vis-à-vis the parliament and other external
controls, cutting back transparency and exchange of information
with third parties, and restricting media access.
These are strategies populist politicians can use to transform public
administration according to their needs. Neither the dimensions nor
the strategies must necessarily be exhaustive, but they do provide
plausible anchors for studying the administrative implications of
liberal-democratic backsliding. By understanding specific administrative
reform strategies, we then know more about populist politicians’
conduct in government. However, modern bureaucracies are not
passive, permeable structures; they are actors in policymaking.
Bureaucratic reactions are, therefore, crucial for the fate of populist
initiatives.
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Reactions of the Bureaucracy
Conceptualizing bureaucracies as partly autonomous actors in policymaking
goes against some conventional notions. Some argue that
bureaucracies are not political entities. Indeed, the notion that politics
and administration should be treated as separate spheres is not new.
Wilson (1887, p. 212) portrays the latter as the “detailed and systematic
execution of public law,” and therefore apolitical. But, as Peters
(2018a, p. 164) argues, it is exactly “this presumed separation of
administration and politics [that] allows them [public administrators]
to engage in politics.” This means that once bureaucrats are not directly
accountable to the public, they use their technical and legal knowledge
to influence policymaking. Brehm and Gates (2002) offer three paths
which bureaucrats may use to influence policies: working, shirking, or
sabotage. Their premise is that government employees are moved by
functional preferences – that is, the feeling that they are accomplishing
something important. They may thus be interested in taking part in the
policies they are supposed to implement. Take, for instance, Lipsky’s
(2010) suggestion that teachers are the street-level ministers of education.
These civil servants have at least two strong motivations: the
education of cocitizens, and representation of the state to the population.
Problems can arise when bureaucrats do not believe that their
efforts are being dedicated to something desirable.
The literature offers some insights into what happens then. Gailmard
and Patty (2007, p. 874), for instance, divided bureaucrats into two
types: “policy-motivated (‘zealots’) or policy indifferent (‘slackers’).”
Although the motivation of slackers is also important for bureaucratic
conduct, zealots are more crucial when it comes to ideological conflicts.
If they hold the same ideological preferences of the principal, it should
be a win–win situation. However, if they hold different policy preferences
than the principal, zealots may use their expertise to guide the
policy process along a different path than the one expected by the
principal (Downs 1965). Such opposition could be mediated by
a more general public service motivation (see Perry, Hondeghem, and
Wise 2010), which, for instance, includes the “desire to do the job”
(Wilson 1989, p. 159). However, public service motivation should not
be overestimated. By way of example, a recent study has failed to
identify its predictive power on measures of job attendance, and inrole
and extra-role performance (Wright, Hassan, and Christensen
Introduction 15
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2017). Furthermore, a bureaucratic zealot facing an ideologically
opposed government is starkly different from civil servants underperforming.
In the former case, shirking and sabotage are likely outcomes.
Yet shirking and sabotage must not be the only outcomes. The
administration of Ronald Reagan in the United States serves as
a good example. He implemented reforms that aimed at reducing the
size of the government. The civil servants’ rational behavior should
have been to either shirk or sabotage, if they were intent on protecting
their institution. Whereas Aberbach and Rockman (2000) confirm that
serious conflicts indeed took place during this administration, Golden
(2000, p. 163) says that “compliance was the predominant [bureaucratic]
response.” Indeed, the general suspicion of bureaucratic shirking
appears exaggerated (see Peters and Pierre 2017; Pierre and Peters
2017). Even Brehm and Gates have rejected it: “the assumption that
subordinates necessarily prefer shirking over working is unnecessarily
simplistic . . . Workers will prefer producing some outputs over other
outputs; they don’t necessarily shirk at every opportunity” (Brehm and
Gates 2002, p. 43).
When populist politicians come to power in established democracies,
however, this is different from a regular transfer of power. They often
enter office with a transformative agenda. Should we expect bureaucrats
to work, shirk, or sabotage? Different dynamics are conceivable.
Cost–benefit calculations may differ from normal transfers of power,
and bureaucratic reactions may vary in temporal, sectoral, or hierarchical
dimensions. Analyses should refrain from ascribing specific reactions,
be they bureaucracies acting as bulwarks or bulldozers of
democracy, but carefully examine them. In combination with the
populist leaders’ overarching governance concepts and their specific
reform strategies, these reactions are crucial for eventual outcomes.
A Framework to Study Democratic Backsliding and Public
Administration
Taken together, the three areas discussed yield an analytical framework
to study liberal-democratic backsliding and public administration
in a comprehensive manner (see Figure 1.1). It first touches
upon the general governance concepts of governments. What do
they want to accomplish regarding the state bureaucracy? We have
proposed three options: sidelining, ignoring, and using. Depending
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on the choices at this macro level, the analytical framework
addresses the strategies populist politicians can pursue to reform
the state administration. We have identified different options
regarding administrative structure, personnel, resources, norms,
and accountability. The analytical framework further includes the
reactions of the bureaucracy. Will civil servants shirk, work or
sabotage, and under what conditions?
This analytical framework serves as a heuristic that identifies,
based on scientific literature and empirical cues, potentially important
factors for studying the administrative dimensions of liberaldemocratic
backsliding. It guides the contributions to this volume,
which represent the first systematic venture into the relationship
between liberal-democratic backsliding, populism, and public
administration. The remainder of this chapter briefly introduces
the contributions.
General approaches to the bureaucracy
Administrative reform strategies
Reactions of the bureaucracy
Political level
Administrative level
Sidelining Ignoring Using
Structures Resources Personnel
Norms Accountability
Working Shirking Sabotage
Figure 1.1 Analytical framework
Source: own compilation.
Introduction 17
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