Regulatory independence and technical expertise under populism: risk factors or protective barriers against illiberal attacks?

The increasing threat to democracies posed by the worldwide emergence of illiberal, populist, and autocratic regimes has been raising important questions for regulators and public administrators alike. The well-known theory of the ‘Regulatory State’ has long pointed to the importance of regulatory independence and technical expertise as credible commitment and legitimacy enhancing factors (Majone's 1994, 1997). Under populism, however, resentment and attacks against independent expertise (saw as technocratic and elitist) have been increasingly normalized, and even pointed as drivers of increased populist trends (Voigt, 2023). In this paper we engage with this debate by discussing if levels of (formal and informal) independence as well as technical capacity can be associated to differences in levels of success in bureaucratic resistance against illiberal attacks. Contributing to debates on bureaucratic resistance to the democratic backsliding (Bauer 2023), we compare the results of four cases of attack by president Jair Bolsonaro against Brazilian agencies’ mission and investigate the impact of different levels of independence and technical expertise in their capacity to resist these illiberal interferences. Our cases involve only agencies explicitly attacked by Bolsonaro’s government, two of which are independent regulatory agencies (Brazilian health regulatory agency – Anvisa, and the Brazilian Film Agengy - Ancine) and two with regulatory functions, but no formal independence (the National Indigenous People Foundation - FUNAI and the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources - IBAMA). Informed by civil servant’s interviews and historical process tracing we investigate the expectation that higher levels of independence and technical expertise will favour the agencies’ capacity to resist illiberal challenges against their missions. We, therefore, investigate whether independence and technical capacity may act as protective barriers against emerging challenges to the democratic state. By doing so, our article sheds new light and adds to previous revisions of the traditional doctrine of the regulatory state.