The project, titled LIBRAD – Democratic Administration under Illiberal Rule: Impact, Resistance, Resilience, has secured nearly €2.5 million in ERC funding. LIBRAD will investigate how populist governments reshape executive governance and how public administrations respond to illiberal policymaking pressures.
Focusing on local governments across EU member states, the project will analyse transformations in areas such as education, health, migration, and law enforcement. It aims to identify when bureaucrats resist or comply with illiberal demands, offering new theoretical and practical tools to strengthen democratic resilience within state institutions.
“LIBRAD examines how populist governments reshape public institutions and how bureaucrats respond to illiberal pressures,” says Bauer. “By combining comparative local analysis with an interactionist theory of administrative behaviour, the project offers new tools to understand and strengthen democratic resilience within the state apparatus.”
The project will build a unique empirical dataset and develop a novel theory of bureaucratic behaviour in morally complex situations, providing recommendations to reinforce administrative ethics and democratic governance. Findings will be disseminated through policy papers, academic publications, and training materials for civil servants across Europe.
The project is scheduled to begin in early 2026 and will run for five years.
Michael W. Bauer holds the Chair in Public Administration at the Florence School of Transnational Governance (EUI) and is a leading scholar in public administration and European governance.
The European Research Council, established by the European Union in 2007, is Europe’s leading funding body for frontier research. Under the 2024 ERC Advanced Grant call, it awarded €721 million to 281 research projects across 23 countries as part of the Horizon Europe programme.