Politicization in the Public Eye: How Citizens Interpret Bureaucratic Responses to Populist Attacks

Existing public administration scholarship documents how populist governments (e.g., in Israel, Poland, and Hungary) seek to control and politicize bureaucracies, wakening their autonomy and professional legitimacy (e.g., Bauer & Becker, 2020; Moynihan, 2022). Further studies have examined how bureaucracies and individual civil servants respond to these populist attacks, placing them in tension between neutrality norms and professional commitments to the public interest (e.g., Bozeman et al. 2024; Bersch et al., 2025; Yesilkagit et al., 2024). Under populist rule, public administration thus becomes a central battleground of democratic erosion, where publicly visible bureaucratic actions become objects of social interpretation and contestation. Still, we know surprisingly little about how citizens make sense of these confrontations, and specifically whether and how they affect their perceptions regarding the loyalties of public organizations and their employees. Understanding this viewpoint is essential as citizens’ judgments of bureaucracy’s motivations are likely to shape trust and compliance. This paper extends existing research and develops a citizen-centered theoretical framework that aims to explain how various bureaucratic responses to populist attacks acquire political meaning in the public eye. Drawing on attribution theory, it conceptualizes perceived bureaucratic politicization as citizens' specific judgments about the motives and loyalties of public organizations, inferred from visible confrontations between governments and bureaucratic actors. The framework advances three propositions. First, citizens’ interpretations of instances of bureaucratic resistance, compliance, or silence are structured by their partisan identity, which, under populist rule, can also be associated with varying normative assumptions toward political interference, producing systematically polarized judgments of bureaucracies. Second, citizens differentiate between politicization attributed to individual officials and politicization generalized to bureaucratic organizations, shaping whether politicization is perceived as episodic or as evidence of systemic capture. Third, different types of bureaucratic responses to populist attacks may yield different consequences from citizens’ perspectives: While some may unintentionally reinforce populist narratives through polarized motive attributions, others reduce contestation by sustaining shared professional expectations. These propositions are illustrated through discursive reactions to prominent Israeli cases marked by visible and contested conflicts between populist leaders and bureaucratic institutions. By centering citizens’ interpretations, the paper contributes a missing interpretive layer to research on public administration under populist pressure, clarifying how bureaucratic responses shape the social dynamics of democratic erosion. It also lays the theoretical groundwork for analyzing the profound consequences of populist governance for citizen-state relations.