ERC - LIBRAD - Democratic Administration under Illiberal Rule: Impact, Resistance, Resilience

LIBRAD investigates how populists in government reshape executive governance to implement illiberal policy changes. By covertly manipulating the machinery of government, populists erode pluralistic standards, reduce accountability, and politicize the civil service to advance their illiberal agenda. Bureaucrats play a crucial role in this context. Populists both fear them as potential saboteurs of their ambitions and simultaneously need to rely on them to push their agenda. To systematically examine the role of democratic bureaucracies when populists attempt to undermine liberal policymaking, LIBRAD analyses the performance and governance of populist governments at the subnational level in the European Union across areas such as health, education, law enforcement, and migration. It identifies how populists transform government organizations using a novel executive governance framework, advances an innovative group based theory of bureaucratic behaviour in morally complex situations, and develops a new interactionist perspective on civil service ethics. By empirically examining populist rule at the subnational level in EU member states and analysing executive transformations in a selected subsample, LIBRAD seeks to understand when bureaucrats resist to or comply with illiberal demands. The project combines theory testing on the impact of populist rule with theory generation, providing a new interactionist explanation for bureaucratic behaviour. Additionally, LIBRAD will offer practical recommendations to increase administrative resilience against illiberal state deformations and provide insights on enhancing democratic legitimacy through executive organizational reform.