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, andpoliticize 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 andsimultaneously need to rely on them to push their agenda.To systematically examine the role of democratic bureaucracies when populists attempt to undermine liberalpolicymaking, LIBRAD analyses the performance and governance of populist governments at the subnational level inthe European Union across areas such as health, education, law enforcement, and migration. It identifies how populiststransform government organizations using a novel executive governance framework, advances an innovative groupbased theory of bureaucratic behaviour in morally complex situations, and develops a new interactionist perspective oncivil service ethics.By empirically examining populist rule at the subnational level in EU member states and analysing executivetransformations in a selected subsample, LIBRAD seeks to understand when bureaucrats resist to or comply with illiberaldemands. The project combines theory testing on the impact of populist rule with theory generation, providing a newinteractionist explanation for bureaucratic behaviour. Additionally, LIBRAD will offer practical recommendations toincrease administrative resilience against illiberal state deformations and provide insights on enhancing democraticlegitimacy through executive organizational reform.