Bureaucratic Responses to Populist Local Leadership: Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Design

The public sector increasingly operates under conditions of permanent alert. Beyond crises such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, populist and far-right movements—combined with declining trust in public institutions—are straining democratic systems and accelerating democratic erosion. In this context, the civil service is often portrayed as a stabilizing anchor, essential for safeguarding the functioning and legitimacy of public administration under populist pressure. Public debate and academic scholarship therefore emphasize strengthening democratic resilience within the civil service, including reinforcing administrative autonomy, international monitoring, regulatory mechanisms, and targeted education and professional development of public sector leadership. Existing research has largely examined bureaucratic responses in countries already governed by populist politicians, focusing on ex post adaptations to populist rule. Much less is known about how public administrations respond before populists consolidate power. This article addresses this gap by examining three continental European federal systems—Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—where populist actors have not yet gained significant influence across all political levels. It contributes to the literature on civil service politicization, democratic backsliding, and resilience by systematically analyzing public servants’ conceptions of democracy and their implications for bureaucratic behavior. The study develops analytical approaches to capture the behavior of bureaucratic leaders situated between “resistance” and “compliance” under populist pressure. The central research question asks: How do civil servants’ conceptions of democracy shape their reactions to populist leadership? In addressing this, the article also considers the role of public service motivation. Theoretically, the article integrates fragmented strands of research by drawing on democratic political theory and established categorizations in public administration. Empirically, it employs a quasi-experimental survey design at the municipal level. Using a novel large-N survey among municipalities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the study analyzes street-level bureaucrats’ responses to various populist governance scenarios. The analysis builds on established measures of public service motivation, critical loyalty, and the V-Dem conceptualization of democracy.