Democratic Backsliding, Populism, and Public Administration

Abstract

What happens to public administration when populists are elected into government? This article argues that populists seek to realize an anti-pluralist reform agenda, thereby fuelling trends of democratic backsliding. Against this background, the article discusses potential goals and strategies of populist public administration policy and introduces examples of how populists sought to capture (Orbán in Hungary), dismantle (Fujimori in Peru), sabotage (Trump in the United States), and reform (Blocher in Switzerland) the state bureaucracy. In doing so, populists in government aim at structures, resources, personnel, norms, and accountability relationships. The examples suggest that populist public administration policies can have profound impact on policymaking and democracy, underlining the need for a broader research agenda on this issue area.

Introduction

Recent years have witnessed a global wave of democratic backsliding. This gradual reversal of democratic standards by incumbent governments seems to have overtaken revolutions, coups d’état, and external interventions as the biggest threat to democracies (Bermeo 2016). In many cases, these developments have been fueled by populist politicians entering government and implementing sweeping institutional reforms. Many of these dynamics have been discussed and well documented, as the literature on populism and its effects on democracy is burgeoning (see, e.g., Norris 2017; Norris and Inglehart 2019; Pierson 2017). However, one crucial component of modern government is largely missing from these debates: public administration. Given that policymaking relies to a great extent on bureaucracies, this omission leaves us necessarily with an incomplete understanding of populism and its implications for democratic governance. While first assessments of the relationship between populism and bureaucracy, primarily focused on the United States, have recently been completed (e.g., Peters and Pierre 2019; Rockman 2019), a broader research agenda has not yet emerged.

This article seeks to provide orientation for such an agenda by probing into two specific research avenues worth pursuing: goals and strategies of populist public administration policies. What follows is a conceptual and empirical exercise, aimed at raising awareness of the impact that populist approaches toward the state bureaucracy can have on policymaking and democracy. The article builds on scholarship on democratic breakdown, populism, and public administration to elicit potential ends and means of such public administration policies, before illustrating their real-world occurrence with examples of past and present populist governments. This exploration may help to stimulate further research on democratic backsliding, populism, and public administration.

For these purposes, the article proceeds as follows. It first clarifies the terminology and relationship of key concepts. As understood here, democratic backsliding means the reduction of political pluralism, and populism, claiming to speak for a single people, is one possible driver of such developments. As public administration has become a pluralist institution in modern democracies, populists will need to address it in their quest to “rewrite the operational manual of the state in their favour” (Müller 2016, 56), that is, they need to mold and steer it according to their ideological needs. These needs may differ, however, and the following section discusses variations in populist ideology regarding the state, which in combination with differences in the robustness of administrative orders yield specific goals of populist public administration policy: capturing, dismantling, sabotaging, or reforming the state bureaucracy.

The article goes on to identify five strategies to transform bureaucracies into instruments of populist rule: centralization of structure (1) or resources (2), politicization of personnel (3) or norms (4), and reduction of accountability (5). These strategies resemble common efforts to strengthen political steering capacities vis-à-vis the bureaucracy; it is their extreme application, justified by an alleged will of the people, that makes them populist. The relevance of these goals and strategies then becomes evident in the policies of four populists in government: Orbán in Hungary, Fujimori in Peru, Trump in the United States, and Blocher in Switzerland. These examples not only underline the common anti-pluralist core of populist public administration policies; they also demonstrate variation in goals and strategies. These findings thus underline the normative and analytical significance of this issue area. As a soft subtype of authoritarian public administration policy, populist approaches to the state bureaucracy can create lasting impact on both policymaking and democracy. The conclusion thus calls for more systematic research on the relationship between populism, democracy, and public administration.

The Relevance of Public Administration for Democratic Backsliding and Populism

Democratic backsliding and populism are both controversial concepts whose ambiguities have rendered systematic debates difficult. This section lays out the meaning of these concepts in the following analysis, and it shows how they relate to public administration.

As for democratic backsliding, this article follows Bermeo’s (2016) use of the concept that captures, in times of coups and revolutions becoming rarer, the more clandestine ways of undermining democracy by incumbent governments. A cross-cutting theme here is “executive aggrandizement” (Bermeo 2016, 10), which can, inter alia, be based on censoring the media, subverting horizontal accountability, and manipulating elections. This specific interpretation of democratic backsliding has been criticized on normative and analytical grounds. Regarding the former, the concept implicitly defines democracy as liberal. Many understandings of democracy are more nuanced; the notion of liberalism itself has drawn plenty of criticism. Accordingly, debates on what counts as democratic backsliding are often heated. While acknowledging different interpretations of democracy, this articles restricts its analysis to the liberal one, which takes a negative view of the concentration of political power and emphasizes the importance of civil rights, the rule of law, and checks and balances (see Coppedge 2017).

Bermeo’s conceptualization of democratic backsliding has also been criticized for its imprecision, its subjective starting point, and its lack of measurement strategies and reliable data (Mechkova, Lührmann, and Lindberg 2017). These problems lead to suspicions that the phenomenon might not be as relevant as portrayed. The existence of a “third wave of autocratization” (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019) has, however, been empirically substantiated. While claims of the end of liberal democracy (Diamond 2016; Runciman 2018) appear exaggerated, “the deterioration of qualities associated with democratic governance, within any regime” (Waldner and Lust 2018, 8), is apparent. This article acknowledges the analytical problems associated with democratic backsliding. Instead of dismissing it, however, it seeks to complement it by illuminating the administrative dimension of executive aggrandizement.

Strongly linked to the debate on democratic backsliding, and no less contentious, is the recent surge of populism (see, e.g., Hawkins, Read, and Teun 2017; Kriesi 2014). According to some observers, the populist conquest of government authority fuels backsliding and constitutes a threat to Western democracies in particular (Norris 2017). Others warn that the relationship between populism and democracy is complex, and in some circumstances, populist movements may even boost democracy (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, ch. 5; Mouffe 2018). Indeed, in authoritarian regimes or systems with representation gaps, populist movements can empower disadvantaged groups. They may also, as the Populist Party in the United States in the nineteenth century has done, promote measures widely considered to strengthen democratic governance, such as referenda. Whether populism effectively weakens or strengthens democracy thus depends on the circumstances—and, again, on the precise definition of both terms.

This article argues that while populism may develop positive effects in other settings, it threatens established liberal democracies. The ideational approach to populism, as championed by Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017, 6), considers it to be “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the [general will] of the people.” In a similar vein, Müller (2016, 19–20) defines populism as “a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some way morally inferior.” Following this logic, populists are not only anti-elitist, but also anti-pluralist.

This anti-pluralism runs counter modern notions of liberal democracy. “A considerable degree of pluralism,” Robert Dahl argued (1978, 191), “is a necessary condition, an essential characteristic, and a consequence of a democratic regime.” In a similar vein, Ernst Fraenkel (1964) stated that a common will of the people does not exist a priori but can only materialize in compromises of interests in a pluralist setting. This does not preclude broad consensus on certain policies, but it guarantees the option to voice disagreement. For this to happen, Fraenkel argued, democracies must have a “controversial” and a “noncontroversial” sector. In the latter regard, the rules of the political game must be fair, legal norms must be steadfast, and civility as a principle of human interaction must be maintained. What is democratically problematic with contemporary populists are not necessarily their policy stances. It is, rather, their attack on the “non-controversial” sector in order to delegitimize pluralism, dissent, and opposition. While some demands may be grounded in legitimate grievances, the claim of exclusive representation of the people is at odds with how liberal democracy is practiced today.

While this argument may seem intuitive regarding political institutions, its relevance for public administration appears rather dubious at first glance. Conventional wisdom has it that bureaucrats implement what political agents demand; and if not, the latter must find better ways of controlling and steering. In empirical practice, however, interactions between politicians and the bureaucracy are multifaceted and complex. Political control over the bureaucracy can never be perfect, which is why questions about the democratic quality of the administrative apparatus itself become relevant. In the famous words of Dwight Waldo, who forcefully advocated this point of view, it is not credible to claim that “autocracy during working hours is the price to be paid for democracy after hours” (Waldo 1952, 87).

Since Waldo’s call, decades of modernization and democratization have exercised their effect on public administration. Present-day bureaucracies fulfill various roles in policymaking; they are elaborate organizations with autonomous tendencies, operating in complex political environments. Research about the role of the bureaucracy in policymaking is abundant.¹ At the same time, their ever-growing importance for the provision of common goods has been paired with an increasing number of accountability structures, channels for citizen participation, transparency laws, and other measures to render public administration compatible with the political pluralism of contemporary democracies. Modern bureaucracy has in many contexts morphed into a vital institution of democratic life (see, e.g., Lehmbruch 1991; Nabatchi 2010).

Here the argument comes full circle. Public administration as a pluralist institution of liberal democracy is at odds with populist ideologies perceiving a single will of the people. If populism is more than an electoral strategy, it must, once in government, seek to transform the bureaucracy to effectively realize its agenda. The resulting anti-pluralist public administration policies would contribute to democratic backsliding. This scenario should raise normative and analytical concerns. At present, however, very little scholarship examines such issues. The next two sections, therefore, discuss goals and strategies of populist public administration policy to demonstrate the relevance of this issue area, and from what angles it could be approached.

Populist Public Administration Policy in Theory

Public administration policy means a program—usually followed by a government—to reform the bureaucratic apparatus in order to create a more effective government in line with a specific ideology (Böhret and Siedentopf 1983; Christensen and Lægreid 2003). In modern political systems, such attempts at reform are frequent. Populist governments seeking to implement their own public administration policy are therefore not extraordinary. What sets them apart from other reform initiatives, following the reasoning above, is their transformative character that contradicts central notions of liberal democracy. Populist public administration policy thus seeks to increase effectiveness and efficiency according to its own priorities, just as every other governments would do. Yet given its anti-pluralism, the efforts will aim at eliminating pluralism in the state bureaucracy. Nonetheless, one must not confuse populist and authoritarian policies. Strategies to transform the bureaucracy by force would, for instance, fall into the latter category. Populist public administration policies, as understood here, are rather borderline interpretations of legitimate strategies. They contradict what Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018, 106) call the norm of institutional forbearance: “Politicians do not use their institutional prerogatives to the hilt, even if it is technically legal to do so, for such action could imperil the existing system.” Before delving into such strategies, however, another question should be asked of populist public administration policies: to what end?

Goals

Populism comes in various guises. Beyond the commonality of homogeneous perceptions of a single people they are claiming to represent and defend against some threat, populists differ in numerous ways. On the one hand, they vary along many organizational criteria. Populism can be personality driven or based on a movement; it can be a national or a regional phenomenon; and it can emerge within or outside established political structures, to name a few distinctions. On the other hand—and more important for the scope of this article—ideological differences are plenty. Each populism has a distinct underpinning for its anti-pluralist outlook, ranging from cultural to ethnic or socioeconomic. Some populisms focus on single issues, say immigration, while others take on several topics simultaneously, for instance, blending xenophobic sentiment with chauvinistic economic agendas (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017; Müller 2016).

Populists also vary in their outlook on public administration, the topic of interest here. To be sure, before entering government, most populists will likely rail against the bureaucracy, which is, almost by definition, part of the opposed establishment. Yet their general views on the state and its administrative manifestation are likely to differ; and upon entering government, these differences will eventually come to the fore. In simplified, dichotomous terms, the populist stances can be positive or negative, viewing public administration as either necessary to further populist ideology or a hindrance to be minimized when speaking for “the people.” These stances, which will be more nuanced in the empirical world, can help to explain populist approaches toward the state bureaucracy.

Populists cannot engage in institution-building from scratch, however. When entering government, they are faced with an established administrative order. This status quo comes with legacies and path dependencies that constrain the administrative choices available. The term “order” also denotes the embeddedness of bureaucracies. Their surrounding environment is important as well. Regarding pluralism, this relates to its safeguards in the political system. If these are still intact, anti-pluralist reforms are likely to be more difficult in the administrative sphere as well. In simple dichotomous terms, these administrative orders can be fragile or robust; that is, their receptiveness for governmentally induced change is high or low.

In combination, these factors yield four goals of populist public administration policy (see table 1). It is plausible that the goals come in orders of preference. Populists with a negative view of the state will preferentially seek to dismantle the bureaucracy. Yet this will only be immediately possible if existing administrative orders are fragile. If they are robust, anti-state populists must first seek to sabotage the bureaucracy so to limit the established bureaucracy’s capacity to counteract the new populist government. Populists with a positive view of the state will preferentially seek to capture its institutions, including the administration, to fully realize their political agenda. Again, however, this will only be immediately possible when facing fragile orders. If the administrative orders in place turn out to be robust, pro-state populists must pursue incremental reform.

These populist goals toward the bureaucracy may, as many other governmental agendas, change over time. Likely scenarios are, for instance, that even robust administrative orders become (due to permanent pressure applied by populists in government) ever more fragile, enabling capture or dismantling, or that initially bureaucracy-skeptical populists come to like a strong state. To fully understand the dynamics of populists in government, future empirical studies should therefore not consider goals to be static but changeable, to be measured on a repeated basis. Furthermore, populist views of the state may depend on the policy area. A desire for a strong state in law enforcement could, for instance, be coupled with a preference for a weak state in economic affairs. Disaggregating populist ideology can help to better understand their public administration policies. Then, once their goals are determined, the question of strategy becomes vital.

Strategies

How can populists transform public administration according to their anti-pluralist ideology? Given the lack of current evidence, a look back at history can help. Precedent for anti-pluralist administrative reforms can be found in the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century. Such retrospectives provide, admittedly, limited comparability. Present-day populists are not fascists, and most of the current democracies are more solid than the young republics back then. Nevertheless, populism and authoritarianism share a disdain of pluralism that makes the administrative policies of the fascist era relevant for current times.² Five lines of anti-pluralist public administration policy are evident in the cases of Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Austria—the ones most intensively researched in historical transformation studies. They relate to central categories of public administration research, namely, organizational structure, resource allocation, personnel policy, bureaucratic ethics, and organizational environment (Chandler 2000; Heady 2001).

First, the incoming governments centralized administrative structures by reducing autonomy in vertically and horizontally differentiated systems (for Portugal, see Branco 2016, 88; Madureira 2007, 89, 95; Schmitter 1975, 25; for Italy, see Bach and Breuer 2010, 314). As even the most powerful authoritarian leaders cannot build new bureaucratic structures from scratch, this change was often incremental. The new rulers sought to disempower established organizations by creating new ones, planting new units in traditional bureaucracies, and transferring power to parts of the administrative system that were more ideologically consolidated and responsive to the wishes of the new leadership (for Germany, see Reichardt and Seibel 2011, 19; for Portugal, see Madureira 2007, 95). Second, organizational realignment was realized through massive redistribution of resources among the administrative agencies. Budget and personnel allocations reshuffled administrative powers, while the formal setup remained intact. Third, the new governments sought to influence administrative personnel. Purges of staff and top bureaucrats occurred eventually, albeit to different degrees, in all four cases (for Germany, see Bracher et al. 1962, 241; Caplan 1988, 145; for Italy, see Bach 1990, 144; Cole 1938; for Austria, see Tálos and Manoschek 2005; for Portugal, see Costa Pinto 2004, 107; Madureira 2007). Following large-scale dismissals, the governments often placed ideological supporters in positions of strategic importance, and they changed rules and procedures of recruitment and career progression to consolidate their nascent executive power (for Germany, see Caplan 1988, 131ff.; for Portugal, see Costa Pinto 2004, 107). Fourth, the incoming authoritarian leadership sought to overhaul bureaucratic norms to establish an administrative culture that framed critique as disobedience and suppressed dissenting opinions (for Germany, see Bracher et al. 1962, 214; Caplan 1988, 154–65; Reichardt and Seibel 2011, 19; for Portugal, see Madureira 2007, 80). Bureaucrats were expected to be loyal to the new, charismatic leadership, not to institutions or constitutions (for Germany, see Reichardt and Seibel 2011, 9; for Italy, see Bach and Breuer 2010, 331). Fifth, the governments implemented their anti-pluralism through extensive use of executive decree that sidelined legislative bodies and representative deliberation (for Germany, see Bracher, Schulz and Sauer 1962, 91; for Italy, see Bach and Breuer 2010, 319; for Austria, see Tàlos and Manoschek 2005, 139). The effect was a reconfiguration of power that granted total authority over the bureaucracy to the executive and silenced external pressures.

These five directions of change—centralizing structures (1) and resource allocation (2), politicizing staff (3) and norms (4), and reducing external accountability (5)—resemble many reform trends associated with governments considered firmly pluralistic. It is, therefore, not the direction of these reforms, but their depth that makes them anti-pluralist. In these historical instances, centralizing structures was aimed not only at better control but also at the elimination of internal dissent. Reallocating resources was not a mere manifestation of priorities but meant the starving out of deviant agencies. At the same time, staff was not to be simply better led but to be made completely obedient, while norms of bureaucratic neutrality were not softened but abolished. Eschewing accountability was the norm rather than the exception.

Pluralism is a continuum, in the political system as much as in public administration. Imposing limits is deemed legitimate to safeguard the functioning of bureaucratic organization; excessive pluralism would result in bureaucratic anarchy. Too much reduction, however, would run counter to notions of liberal democracy that have taken hold in the administrative sphere. There are no clear thresholds for bureaucracies to be considered pluralist, as single democratic institutions are embedded in larger, composite regimes with specific emphases (Merkel 2004)—which means that evaluating the degree change is also difficult. Future empirical studies can, however, provide more precise estimates by comprehensively defining the administrative status quo and documenting the following reforms in the five dimensions. This will allow for better comparative insights, without losing sight of each country’s idiosyncrasies. Another important question for future research will be the selection of reform strategies by populist governments—and how it relates to their public administration goals.

Linking Goals with Strategies

Robust relationships between the goals and strategies of populist public administration policies can only emerge through comprehensive empirical work. But the preceding discussion does raise a few plausible expectations. The resulting scenarios mostly differ in comprehensiveness, that is, how many administrative areas witness change under a populist government. Depending on their goal, some strategies may prove either sufficient or necessary. It is plausible that, when facing fragile administrative orders, populists can accomplish much by centralizing structures. If their goal is to dismantle public administration, this strategy may already suffice. If populists seek to capture the state, however, more comprehensive approaches are likely to be necessary. Resources, staff, norms, and accountability will all have to be addressed, if a full transformation in line with populist ideology aimed at.

As for the other two goals, expectations are a bit blurrier. With structural centralization off the table because of the robustness of administrative orders, populists may focus their efforts on any of the other administrative dimensions: resource, staff, norms, or external accountability. How many dimensions they tackle to pursue their goals—by reforming or sabotaging of their state bureaucracy—cannot be determined at this point; equifinal options are likely to exist. Sometimes, politicizing staff may suffice; at other times, influencing norms may be necessary, and so forth. In the end, some configurations of strategies may prove more frequent then others, depending on the goals.

These all are empirical questions. To answer them, fine-grained operationalizations and testable hypotheses need to be developed in future empirical studies. The proposed goals and strategies of public administration policies can be starting points for such endeavors. They raise reasonable expectations regarding the relevance and variation of populist public administration policies. The next section underlines their usefulness by discussing empirical equivalents. They show that populists deal with public administration along the outlined categories, and how this can have severe repercussions on policymaking and democracy.

Populist Public Administration Policies in Action

This section investigates four examples of past and present populist governments engaging with established bureaucracies in initially liberal-democratic settings. In line with the purpose of this article, these examples are not fully fledged case studies, but surveys of empirical equivalents of the proposed goals and strategies of populist public administration policy. They are drawn from the pool of populist governments widely discussed in reference to democratic backsliding (see, e.g., Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017; Müller 2016). In these cases, populists sought to capture (Orbán in Hungary), dismantle (Fujimori in Peru), sabotage (Trump in the United States), and reform (Blocher in Switzerland) the bureaucracy. To these ends, they aimed at changing administrative structures, resources, personnel, norms, or accountability. Some were successful, others failed; but all examples show that populist public administration policy is a relevant phenomenon.

Capture: Orbán in Hungary

Since Victor Orbán and his Fidesz Party came to power—for the second time—in 2010, they have effectively captured the state. This is the outcome of a populism with a positive view of the state meeting a fragile administrative order. The government’s institutional policies toward building an “illiberal state” have, inter alia, curbed the independence of the constitutional court, gerrymandered voting districts in favor of Fidesz, replaced the old budgetary council with a new body under party control, strengthened media supervision, and interfered with nongovernmental organization activities (Puddington 2017). The populism behind these reforms is essentially nativist, focused on a “Christian-national” culture. It is the state’s function to protect this culture, making Orbán’s populism decidedly pro-state. In his words, the “Hungarian nation is […] a community that needs to be organized, strengthened and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state” (Tóth 2014, 1).

In terms of the existing politico-administrative order, Orbán found fertile ground for his agenda. In 2010, the Third Hungarian Republic had existed for merely two decades. Support for a strong state, partly a communist legacy, was still prevalent among citizens and politicians. Despite national and international efforts to support pluralist democracy, strains of anti-pluralism lingered in the political culture (Bayer 2013). Furthermore, administrative reforms following the democratic transition had produced limited outcomes, leaving the bureaucracy in partial paralysis and disarray (Kovacs and Hajnal 2017, 80). The politico-administrative order thus offered little opposition to Orbán’s agenda. He was free to capture the state bureaucracy and use it to implement his brand of populism (see also Müller 2016, 44).

This project has not merely focused on reforming the political playing field; the Orbán governments since 2010 have also targeted Hungary’s public administration system. Respective strategies can be identified in every anti-pluralist dimension (for these paragraphs, see Hajnal 2015; Kovacs and Hajnal 2017). Steering capacities of central government were strengthened at the expense of other levels and departments. Vertical centralization was realized through new “county government offices,” staffed with appointees of the government. These new offices replaced older central agencies at lower levels, while their subordinate “district government offices” took over functions from local governments. This structural reform was accompanied by resource-based steering that cut funds for local governments by almost 80 percent. Another strategy of structural reform was horizontal centralization. Various ministries and agencies were merged, bringing the central government more directly under the control of the prime minister. Orbán secured, among other things, the rights to govern through executive decree, even without the prior consultation—let alone consent—of the formally responsible minister, and to appoint all senior officials in the central administration. Furthermore, the Orbán government introduced a new type of agency that can be established by governmental decree, without the two-thirds majority in Parliament required for other agencies. Not surprisingly, the accountability structures of the new agencies are different, making them more susceptible to governmental influence than agencies founded through legislation.

The personnel dimension of public administration has also been important for Orbán. Several initiatives aimed to make the civil service more responsive to his government. In 2010, the Hungarian Parliament passed a law that allowed the dismissal of civil servants without giving any reasons. Although it was eventually struck down by the constitutional court, the law set the trend for later reforms, such as the inclusion of loyalty in performance measurement and increasing the surveillance of staff. The Orbán governments also made full use of the available staff politicization mechanisms. As Hajnal and Csengodi (2014, 50) report, the “unconstrained possibility for the political executive to fill all ranks in the central government apparatuses with politically loyal, ‘reliable’ civil servants […] was in fact used to a large extent.” They also argue that taken together, the staff measures decreased trust and fostered paranoia, thereby altering traditional norms of neutrality and making the career bureaucracy more compliant.

Furthermore, the Orbán government has also weakened accountability channels. Powers of the parliamentary ombudsperson were curbed, while several fora of interest intermediation, such as the National Interest Reconciliation Council and the Economic and Social Council, were dissolved. The Hungarian state’s relationship to civil society organizations has long been strained, especially regarding foreign actors in the human rights sector, but this reached a new low when the government withdrew from the Open Government Partnership, an initiative that seeks to foster transparency and accountability, in 2016. Public administration in Hungary has therefore become more secluded under Orbán.

Orbán’s government has taken great efforts to make the Hungarian bureaucracy more receptive to populist rule. Centralization of structures, excessive politicization of staff, and the reduction of accountability were the main strategies, but the policies also showed signs of norm disruption and disciplinary resource allocation. Taken together, these measures went far beyond ordinary measures of enhancing their steering capacities. It is thus a comprehensive case of populist public administration aimed at capturing the state.

Dismantling: Fujimori in Peru

Alberto Fujimori’s stint as Peruvian president (1990–2000) demonstrates what can happen when a fragile administrative order is taken on by a populism with a negative view of the state—which is wide-ranging dismantling of public administration. His regime is generally considered a prime example of both successful populism and its slippery slope toward authoritarianism (see, e.g., Ellner 2003; Weyland 2006). In a self-coup two years after his election, Fujimori suspended the legislature and the judiciary, and although international pressure led him to reinstate respective institutions, checks and balances remained limited. He also censored the media and curtailed the autonomy of civil society organizations. Fujimori’s initial popularity declined during his second term in office, leading him to increase corruption to stabilize his rule. Yet by 2000, his reelection was so plagued by scandal that he fled soon after to Japan.

At its core, Fujimori’s populism was directed against the state and its established elites. In his first election campaign, he remained rather vague, claiming to “represent the interests of common people against the sectarianism and self-interested machinations of traditional politicians” (Roberts 1995, 94). Once in office, however, he showed more neoliberal leanings. Faced with dire economic prospects, his government implemented a harsh structural adjustment program that followed the Washington consensus of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. Fujimori’s populist justification portrayed “Peru’s political establishment as a privileged, self-reproducing dominant class that threatened to block the implementation of economic reforms while placing partisan interests above the public good” (Roberts 1995, 98), while claiming for himself a veil of technocratic rationality. He later combined this technocracy with selective spending programs to generate support for his otherwise neoliberal agenda.

Fujimori was able to fully implement this agenda because he faced little opposition from the fragile administrative order. While Fujimori lay most foundations with his self-coup, his success also stemmed from a democratic system that had never been robust to begin with. At the time, Peru’s experiences with democracy were limited; the 10 years before Fujimori came into power were, in fact, the longest spell of democratic rule in Peru. Accordingly, the system was, at best, still receptive to authoritarian rule; at worst, it was prone to collapse. The executive branch was the primary source of authority in the Peruvian system, both in formal terms and in informal recognition. Civil society was weak, while the party system was fragmented. The severe economic crisis that plagued Peru at the time was also beneficial for Fujimori’s transformational agenda (Mauceri 2006, 42–45). In the end, scant opposition stood between him and his aim to dismantle the allegedly inefficient and corruption-ridded state.

Without much opposition, Fujimori’s public administration policies included several strategies of anti-pluralism (see for the following Mauceri 2006, 49–57). Above all, Fujimori engaged in a series of structural reforms. He centralized the executive bureaucracy by creating the Ministry of the Presidency, which was now responsible for large infrastructure projects and spending programs. This also increased his ability to steer the administration through resources. Fujimori also curtailed feeble advances in decentralization by closing down regional assemblies after his self-coup. In their place, the central government installed local offices with appointed members. As for regulatory agencies, Fujimori engaged in wholesale reform, engineering these administrations toward his economic agenda of liberalization and privatization. Any potential bureaucratic obstacles to his populism were essentially dismantled or sidelined.

The civil service system also saw enormous changes under Fujimori. The first years brought extensive layoffs of public sector employees in line with his economic agenda. And while staff numbers grew again in later years, their status was less regulated (Echebarría and Cortázar 2007, 137), which made them more susceptible to political influence. Furthermore, Fujimori established two networks—one personal, another technocratic—with respect to crucial government positions. Finally, his government also reduced external control over the executive. Parliamentary and judicial control had already been curbed during the self-coup, but the Fujimori government continued to intervene on behalf of its officials in case of allegations of corruption and other misconduct.

Fujimori’s public administration policy thus featured reforms in many dimensions, but his focus was on structural centralization. His early years as Peruvian president are an extreme example of populist public administration aimed at dismantling the state bureaucracy, but they provide instructive insights in how fragile orders can effectively disappear in little time.

Sabotage: Trump in the United States

The state lies also at the core of Donald Trump’s populism, and it is equally perceived as a negative entity. Trump’s attacks on the “administrative state” are frequent (Goodsell 2019; Bauer 2018). In his inaugural address, he promised that “we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another—but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the American People” (White House 2017). A year later, in his first State of the Union speech, Trump boasted that “in our drive to make Washington accountable, we have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history” (White House 2018). Some members of his circle had even more ambitious aims. For example, Steve Bannon, formerly one of Trump’s earliest and closest advisors, stated that the difference between the right in the United States and Europe lies in their view of the state—namely, European populists want to gain control over the state, while Americans seek (metaphorically) to blow it up (Lewis 2018; Scheuermann 2018).

Trump’s agenda is therefore nothing short of administrative dismantling. His room to maneuver, however, is limited by the United States’ robust administrative order. This is shown not least in the bureaucracy itself, as evidenced by high-profile resignations and confessions of administrative sabotage (New York Times 2018). Furthermore, the administrative order is embedded in a stable institutional and political system. For all his attacks on the media, Trump still faces intensive, often critical news coverage. He must deal with a Congress not necessarily keen on implementing his agenda, and many of his executive initiatives fail to pass the courts. Furthermore, strong federalism puts limits on the realization of his policy agenda. Trump and his supporters blame the “deep state” for such obstructions. Without any conspiracy theory, this claim is not too far off. It is in fact the robust administrative order that impedes the president’s populist anti-state agenda. The best he can currently do is try to sabotage the bureaucracy.

To this end, Trump has deployed several anti-pluralist strategies. Personnel has been a key area of action. Politicization is common in the US system, with some 3000 leading positions appointed by the incoming administration (Lewis 2010, 3). These appointments are a prerogative of the president and have been so long before Trump. His well-established hostility toward the federal bureaucracy and key agencies, especially in environmental and social affairs (Belton, Krutilla, and Graham 2017; Pierson 2017), has also partly been shared by some of his predecessors, especially Ronald Reagan. Trump, however, took personnel policy to an extreme. Upon entering the White House, he filled leading bureaucratic positions with openly obstructive personnel. Before their appointments, the new heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other regulatory agencies were outright opponents of their respective offices, committed to dismantling regulatory activities. Where no such anti-leaders were installed, leadership positions were often left vacant, a strategy that accomplished similar objectives since acting heads often refrain from making bold decisions or taking initiative (Rein 2017). Furthermore, in making these and other appointments, Trump has largely neglected expertise. In the Department for Homeland Security, for instance, public sector novices have dominated discussions on critical policies, while career officials with years of experience have been sidelined (Reitmann 2018).

Going beyond direct politicization, other personnel choices have also left the career bureaucracy impaired. Internal reorganizations, redeployments, and open contempt for past achievements or current initiatives have frustrated staff—many of the most skilled and most committed of whom were forced to resign (Johnston 2017). Initiatives demanding alignment with the new government ideology have also been disturbing for career officials. In the Energy Department, for instance, efforts to identify department officials involved with previous Obama administration initiatives unfolded more like a search for malfeasants (Booker 2016). Such mistrust from the top discourages personal initiative, and the fear of being fired, relocated, or demoted frustrates large portions of the civil service (Johnston 2017). Sowing even more insecurity, Trump used his first State of the Union speech to call on Congress “to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers—and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people” (White House 2018). While such rhetoric has had little practical value so far, they exemplify Trump’s distrust of the civil service.

The Trump administration has also sought to control the bureaucracy through resources. The first budget blueprint under Trump was an outright attack on the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department, calling for the budget of each to be cut by 30 percent (OMB 2017). The plan would also have eliminated 19 central agencies. When Congress opposed the plan, the Trump administration dropped the outright elimination of agencies but continued its call for steep spending cuts in specific areas (OMB 2018). Far from being simple prioritizations, these proposals threatened the very functionality of some departments. Finally, internal decrees of the Trump administration prohibit contact with the press or with civil society organizations and limit civic consultation in the preparation of regulation (Johnston 2017).

Taken together, in his first two years in office, Trump has sought to implement a populist public administration agenda aimed at sabotaging the state bureaucracy. His policies resonate with conservative traditions of cutting down government (see, for many, Norquist 2008), but they went way beyond. The goal of making government more efficient was completely missing; Trump’s was a purely destructive approach (Goodsell 2019). That this strategy has thus far not produced more damage is a sign of the robustness of the US administrative system—and shows how important robust administrative orders are for containing populists (Peters and Pierre 2019; Rockman 2019).

Reform: Blocher in Switzerland

What can happen when populists with a positive view of the state face a robust administrative order is, finally, exemplified by the Christoph Blocher’s time in the Swiss Federal Council, the country’s government. His party, the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP), and its predecessors had been the fourth strongest force in Switzerland for decades, before the campaign against joining the European Economic Area galvanized its latent populist tendencies. Under Blocher’s influence, the party developed strong positions against Switzerland’s international integration and its immigration policies. This buoyed the SVP to increased electoral success, eventually attracting a plurality of votes (26.7 percent) in the 2003 parliamentary elections. This electoral upset led to the first reform since 1959 of the “magic formula” of Swiss government formation, which defines cabinet allocation among the four main parties. From this point on, the SVP occupied two of seven seats, gaining one at the expense of the Christian Democrats (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2016, 52–53), and making the SVP a strong force in Swiss politics (see, e.g., Kriesi et al. 2005; Manow et al. 2018).

At the time, the SVP populism had personalist, nativist, and neoliberal tendencies. With reference to the state bureaucracy, it depicted a corruption-ridden system that worked against the interests of the Swiss people. Its manifesto for the 2003 election railed against bloated bureaucracies, frivolous expenditure, and undue state intervention in economy and society. It called for a “lean state” that leaves room for individual responsibility. All this follows the basic neoliberal script. In other areas, however, the SVP’s position was hardly anti-state. The 2003 manifesto called for the state to become more active in issues of public safety and to protect infrastructure and social security (SVP 2003). The party saw the Swiss people not as a mass of individuals, but as a community in need of fostering through sensible state intervention. While this differs from the positive state conception in Orbán’s populism, it hardly resembles the anti-state positions of the other two examples. Put simply, the SVP wanted to change the state, not dismantle it.

In doing so, however, it had to come to terms with Switzerland’s robust administrative order. Although the SVP’s rise upended the Swiss party system and prompted the reform of its government formation procedures, the general features of Switzerland’s consensus democracy remained intact. The SVP was part of a broad coalition government and only headed two of seven ministries; hence, its administrative reach at central level was limited. Furthermore, it operated in a political system that emphasized regional autonomy, power dispersion, and minority protection (Vatter 2008), further constraining its ability to induce change.

As a result, the SVP had to content itself with a few reforms of modest importance. In 2007, reflecting on his four years in office, Blocher stated that the government, especially his ministry of justice and police affairs, had curbed the growth of state activity. He also boasted of a new mindset in the bureaucracy regarding government spending and state intervention. Furthermore, staff numbers in his department had decreased. These effects were in line with his reform agenda. However, the SVP admitted that most achievements were only “slight”; and indeed, compared with the administrative goals of the manifesto, success was modest. Minor changes in bureaucratic culture and minimal steering by resources failed to realize the SVP’s agenda in the administrative sphere.

This last example shows how populists with a positive view of the state can seek reform even in the face of robust administrative orders. Norms and resources are viable paths to mold the bureaucracy into new shape. In this case, the room of maneuver was strongly limited, but the combined impact of such measures may be stronger in other instances.

For all their brevity, these four examples show how the election of populist governments can impact on public administration. They also demonstrate that the proposed goals and strategies can help understanding the observable dynamics. Needless to say, the examples only provide first impressions of the respective cases, and the next steps require conceptual and methodological sophistication to assess the precise degrees of administrative change. Plus, the caveats indicated above—i.e., additional variations to be expected across time, policy, and possibly country-specific factors—render the gathering of comparative insights difficult. But these challenges should be accepted. As the examples here show, more knowledge on populist public administration policy is both normatively and analytically required.

Towards a Research Agenda on Public Administration in the Age of Populism

Recent instances of democratic backsliding and the rise of populism have become central points of debate in the social sciences. Public Administration has, so far, been lagging behind, even if there is ample reason to believe that bureaucracy plays a crucial role in both trends. This article has argued that the essence of populist approaches toward the state bureaucracy evolves around reducing pluralism, something that runs counter accepted notions of liberal democracy. Against this background, it has sought to provide some orientation for research by discussing potential goals and strategies of populist public administration policy. Examples from past and present populist governments have shown that these directions are worth pursuing, as their policies can have a profound impact on the functioning of state bureaucracies. These findings thus call for more engagement with democracy and populism by the Public Administration community.

The community can fast-track the process of catching-up with other social sciences by avoiding conceptual ambiguities that have slowed down debates elsewhere. Different viewpoints on democracy and populism can be taken, but analytical precision is needed to arrive at solid conclusions, and explicitness is required for successful communication of findings. As for democracy, this article has focused on pluralism as an integral part of liberal interpretations. Many other criteria can be deemed relevant, too. Their relationships with pluralism should be considered in greater detail. It stands to reason, for instance, that governmental effectiveness, also important for democratic quality, will decrease with growing administrative pluralism. Furthermore, each political system will have its own democratic priorities. This article has highlighted pluralism, but it has not argued that it is synonymous with democracy. The latter is, by now, a multi-dimensional concept and practice, which public administration scholars should acknowledge when addressing issues of backsliding and populism.

The same is true for the intricacies in the debate on populism. There is still no consensus on where it begins and where it ends. This article has sought to give a preliminary answer for public administration policies. It has argued that these are populist if they legally transgress, in the name of “the people,” accepted notions of pluralism when reforming the state bureaucracy. This sets them apart from both pluralist and strongly authoritarian reforms. Many ideologies that accept pluralist ground rules perceive the state—or rather, a strong state—negatively; their attempts to shrink the bureaucracy are, by themselves, not populist. If excessive administrative change is to defend the “pure people” against an “ill-willed establishment,” however, it can be considered populist. At the same time, they are not fully identical with outright authoritarian reforms. In a slight variation, this article has put forward an understanding of populist approaches to the bureaucracy as a soft subtype of authoritarian public administration policy. As opposed to the latter, it does not build on transgressions of the law and use of violence. Here, too, more empirical work can make differences clearer. Comparisons with cases of authoritarian public administration policy from system transformation scholarship (Grzymala-Busse 2007; Meyer‐Sahling 2011, 2009; O’Dwyer; Conor 2004; Slater 2010) can be instructive. It should also be evident that populist public administration measures can be initiated by governments that otherwise adhere to pluralist rules. Empirical research should, accordingly, be careful in its conceptualization of populism and precise in its measurement.

Another crucial issue for future studies concerns the bureaucracy side of the equation. This article has focused on populist governments and their administrative policies, but the outcome of their efforts will depend on more than their goals and strategies. In a first step, paying attention to potential obstacles to populist transformative aspirations, this article has conceptualized administrative orders on the macro level as being either fragile or robust. A finer scale would elicit a more nuanced picture of populists facing established bureaucracies. Furthermore, equally important appears to be the micro level, that is, the reactions of the bureaucrats and the conditions under which they shirk, work, or sabotage (Brehm and Gates 1999; O’Leary 2013, 2017). At the same time, returning to the embeddedness of administrations, differences in political and institutional environments are likely to produce variations in bureaucratic resilience. These and other factors should be considered when explaining the effects of populist public administration policies.

These are some directions that, based on the analysis in this article, seem worth pursuing in the relationship of democratic backsliding, populism, and public administration. To address these issues appropriately, however, a stronger focus on democracy is required in the Public Administration community. Interactions between politicians and the bureaucracy in modern democracies are based on negotiation and collaboration more than on hierarchical control and administrative subordination. This constellation renders the conceptual separation of political and administrative spheres difficult, and it raises questions about the democratic quality of the bureaucracy (Meier and O’Toole 2006). The importance of strengthening pluralistic-democratic administration not only in practice, but also in theory is highlighted by the evidence gathered here. Better concepts and measurement strategies are needed to capture the full range of populist and other anti-pluralist tendencies currently threatening the administrative dimension of liberal democracy. Respective progress could also encourage normative debate on how to reconcile pluralist notions with bureaucratic organization. In the present age of populism and beyond, the relationship between democracy and public administration deserves more systematic attention. This article posits that accepting concessions on the pluralist nature of modern public administration—as currently sought by populists in government—risks compromising democratic public administration and thus eventually democracy itself.

References

Footnotes