Bureaucrats as Guardians of Liberal Democracy? Theorizing a New Role for Civil Servants under Populism

Public administration scholars have for long devoted intellectual efforts to study and understand the uneasy relationship between elected politicians and non-elected civil servants in democratic systems. The viability of liberal democracies is found to be accommodated by a variety of relationships between politicians and bureaucrats that are based on democratic norms and values, reflected by attitudes and role conceptions that are attuned the specific positions politicians and bureaucrats occupy. We will argue in this paper that the election of the authoritarian politicians and populits to positions of executive power within stable and consolidated liberal democracies urges us to revise our understanding of these relationships. More specifically, whereas our understanding has for a major part of the past century been guided by the idea that the uneasy relationship between the two is due to the inherent unresponsiveness of bureaucracy. Instead of thinking that the bureaucracy is there to be under control of elected politicians, we need to see bureaucracy as an institution that is a pillar under the democratic architecture. This brings us to exploring the idea and concept of ‘guardianship’ for the bureaucracy. The concept has often been used by students of civil-military relationships to denote the often self-proclaimed role of the military within weaker democratic regimes. In this paper we are going to delve deeper into this concept and use it as a starting point for theorizing a possibly new role type for bureaucrats in democracies under populist threat.