The Illiberal Challenge to Public Administration

We know relatively well what the “illiberal challenge” actually is—and what populists in government mean for the public administration and public management. What is less clear is what is actually behind the illiberal challenge and what PA as a discipline can or should do about it. The illiberal challenge for PA can be conceived as the attempt of authoritarian populists in power destroying the liberal democracy from within by targeting and using the bureaucracy itself. In doing so the bureaucracy itself gets stripped of pluralist features and is transformed in the a monistic instrument where expertise comes behind the will of the elected leadership. The illiberal challenge is thus a lot about centralization and suppressing legal or expertise based objections. However, beyond direct impacts within affected administrative systems, the illiberal challenge also affects policymaking, i.e., via or with the help of bureaucratic organization policies are re-regulated or, if parliamentary majorities are unavailable, policy contexts are manipulated in order to achieve illiberal agendas (in particular in migration, climate policies, health, etc.). One could argue it is the prerogative of elected government to re-regulate or use the bureaucracy as it pleases. However, the bureaucracy under populist rule can be used to sabotage other democratic institutions and to undo the liberal culture on which the democracy runs. It is this instrumentalization of democratic bureaucracy for democratic backsliding that puts the politics-administration relationship back to the center of attention. The projected paper will therefore take stock of the extant literature about populists in government and how populist rule affects state bureaucracies and bureaucratic agency. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of democratic bureaucracy as to whether bureaucracy is seen as a democratic institution in its own right, and under which conditions then resistance and guardianship by public administration becomes justifiable. The paper will thus study to what extent an strict concept of administrative neutrality still holds—and what it means for models of bureaucratic behavior in economic or institutional tradition if the focus on the control-side of politics-administration relationship needs to be revisited.