Public administration in authoritarian regimes: propositions for comparative research

Abstract

ABSTRACT Authoritarian regimes share an architecture of power that shores up unilateral control from the top while weakening bottom-up initiatives organised independently of central support. This kind of collective choice environment entails administrative options and policy strategies unanticipated by standard theories that explain public administration where the exercise of power is circumscribed by the separation of powers and political representation. How public administration in authoritarian regimes is shaped by radically different patterns of elite power play and state-society interactions is set out in ten propositions, with a focus on why governance solutions that seem inadequate or even impracticable in liberal democracies would be favoured and how variations in leadership style can cascade into broader disparities in administrative behaviour. The conclusion offers an example of how public policy theories originally developed to account for administrative processes and outcomes in the US and other democracies can be comparatively adapted to non-democratic systems.