ABSTRACT The politics of reforms has conventionally been centred on elite strategy, regime type, state capacity, and civic engagement, which often treats social relationships as embedded property rather than an independent variable that drives collective action and incrementally conditions reforms. This paper shifts the lens to social capital as a key driver of local governance reform. It inquires: How do social relationships shape institutions amidst persistent patronage politics? Why does civic power decline and later resurge in societies? This study builds on social capital theory to examine the linkages causing stagnation and facilitating innovations at the local level. Cagayan de Oro City in Southern Philippines, offers a compelling case of how civic networks, once sidelined in local governance, regained their voices and contributed to transforming a dysfunctional housing institution into a collaborative housing model despite entrenched patronage politics. Drawing from interviews and archival data, I argue that meaningful reforms emerge when political leaders are willing to share power, CSOs maintain their autonomy and consistently hold officials accountable, and middle managers act effectively as equilibrators. When social capital is pragmatically leveraged, it becomes a powerful antidote to patronage politics, enabling change agents to build transformative institutions collectively.

ABSTRACT When considering current challenges to the established institutional order based on a pluralist understanding of democracy, a key question arises: What institutional frameworks have successfully mediated between the state and non-state society in the past and contributed to inclusive, legitimate governance? Using Finland as a case study, this article identifies one such key framework: the institution of state committees. Committees have been instrumental in crafting public policy compromises in all Nordic societies, yet they remain relatively unknown internationally. This is particularly true for Finland, where the institution once served as a key site for knowledge-based and legitimacy-creating public policymaking in a conflict-prone society. Unlike in Sweden, the institution was abolished in Finland in the 1990s. The article examines media debates on state committees between 1960 and 1994 from the perspective of democratic legitimacy discussions (Schmidt 2013. “Democracy and Legitimacy in the European Union Revisited: Input, Output and ‘Throughput’.” Political Studies 61 (1): 2–22; Schmidt and Wood 2019. “Conceptualizing Throughput Legitimacy: Procedural Mechanisms of Accountability, Transparency, Inclusiveness and Openness in EU Governance.” Public Administration 97 (4): 727–740). Analysis reveals that despite criticisms of their extra-parliamentary, technocratic and bureaucratic features, the basic legitimacy of the committees was not questioned. Their erosion was due to economic pressure combined with “Europeanisation”, whereby older bureaucratic-corporatist patterns of policy drafting were replaced by more parliament-centred ones.

ABSTRACT During the last decade, concerns have arisen regarding democratic erosion, suggesting that a global democratic recession is underway. Despite the significance of this issue and the growth of related academic literature, the connection between democratic erosion and public administration has been underexplored. Public administration directly impacts the quality of public services, economic prosperity, and human well-being. The weakening of democratic norms could negatively affect the quality of public administration. However, public institutions may also serve as a safeguard against democratic erosion. This study explores the relationship between populism and Italian independent regulatory authorities that were established to operate with technical expertise, shielded from direct political pressure, to ensure greater stability and transparency in strategic areas of public policy. Thus, the research will focus on the different levels of narratives of the Data Protection independent authority, analysing three episodes of conflict between two populistic governments and Data Authority Protection. The research aims to understand whether and how the presence of populist parties in government affects Data Authority Protection autonomy and legitimacy. In this context, we question the mechanisms through which populist-led governments in Italy have sought to exert their influence over independent authorities.

ABSTRACT The rise of populism and the authoritarian shift has triggered a debate on the politics-administration nexus with a focus on the politics of democratic backsliding and the role of the bureaucracy. Recent studies have increasingly concentrated on the strategies of populist politicians to control the bureaucracy and the responses from the bureaucracy to these attempts. However, this dyadic approach to the politics-administration nexus remains limited in explaining fully the ramifications of democratic backsliding on bureaucracy. In this article, we propose a coalitional perspective on the politics of bureaucracy during the process of democratic backsliding. Illustrating the usefulness of this perspective through the Turkish context, the article highlights the role of intra-elite conflict and inter-elite competition in shaping the politics-administration nexus and explains why and how democratic backsliding has led to subordination, instrumentalization, and even deconstruction of bureaucracy in Turkey. As such, the article contributes to our understanding of the dynamics at play during the process of backsliding and the transformation of the politics-administration nexus.

ABSTRACT Democratic backsliding processes erode the institutions and public values of a political system and can lead to the emergence of authoritarian forms of government or shifts towards illiberal democracy. In this context, public administrations are arenas of political dispute and critical instances for implementing anti-pluralist policies and reforms. The final balance could be the weakness of institutional capacities, problems providing essential public services, and several affectations on the policy process. Indeed, the impact of democratic erosion is not the same throughout the public administration. Therefore, analyzing specific public sectors or policy domains could be methodologically appropriate. This article is a longitudinal national case study showing how various strategies have been used to achieve executive aggrandizement through armed forces overstretching in Mexico. We seek to answer the following question: What strategies have the President of the Republic (2018-2024) used to erode professionalism in public safety agencies? To build and analyze this case, we used deductive process tracing with information collected through documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with police and military personnel involved in public security work. We found strong evidence that a mixed strategy combined capture, sabotage, reform, and dismantling actions.

ABSTRACT Democratic myopia, lacking salience, and high uncertainty seem to make it difficult to govern long-term problems like nuclear waste disposal, biodiversity loss or the environmental consequences of infrastructure projects. Participatory approaches may benefit environmental decisions, but the literature largely neglects the implications of the long-termness of many environmental issues. Conversely, the literature on long-term governance disregards the potential of participation to solve long-term problems. To address this gap, this study develops a new conceptual framework and statistically analyzes 303 public environmental decision-making processes to assess the role of participatory governance in addressing long-term environmental problems. The results show that participatory governance indeed helps to solve and prevent long-term environmental problems – but in different ways than it addresses short-term environmental problems. Intensive deliberation proves key for effectively adressing long-term issues, while the representation of environmental and economic interests in the process makes no difference for the environmental standard of the governance output. The opposite is true for short-term environmental problems. Surprisingly, issue uncertainty, while higher in long-term issue settings, does not affect the solution of long-term but only of short-term environmental problems. In general, deliberation seems to be more decisive than mere participation for effectively addressing long-term environmental problems.

ABSTRACT This study examines the governance efficiency of the NDA government in promoting economic growth in India and provides empirical evidence on the influence of a populist national leader on the country’s economic trajectory. Here, we examine the causal effect of the political transition in 2014 on India’s economic growth by constructing a synthetic India, where the transition did not occur, and business as usual persisted. Comparing the per capita income (PCI) trajectories of actual and synthetic India, we find that the 2014 transition initially led to a divergence in PCI paths, with a short-term positive effect on India’s PCI. However, this effect was short-lived, and the gap began to narrow in subsequent years. During the pandemic period, India’s PCI declined more than that of synthetic India, and by the end of the treatment period, the synthetic PCI was higher than the actual PCI. Thus, the advantage that the Indian economy initially gained from the political transition in 2014 lasted only in the short run.

ABSTRACT There have been concerns about democratic backsliding in many countries around the world. A new research agenda, identifying the impact of democratic erosion on public administration – and whether public administration can act as a firewall to democratic backsliding – has arisen as a result. The relationship between public administration and democracy has often been a source of ambiguity, however. The article argues that the relationship depends upon the concept of democracy that is used. Using a maximalist real democracy approach, good public administration is argued to be an essential component of democracy – rather than an adjunct. Indicators of good public administration quality are developed and patterns of quality are mapped around the world. The article provides a general model of public administration reform connecting political leaders’ attempts to enact executive aggrandizement and bureaucratic resistance into a wider political context. It then develops five clusters of causal linkages between public administration and other aspects of democracy which frame the inquiry of the special issue ahead.

ABSTRACT The link between the oil-arms trade has been discussed for a long time but the specific role of the oil price mechanism in the arms imports of net oil exporters has not been effectively proven. This article first constructs a measure of oil-price volatility and then examines its short- and long-run linkages with arms imports. Taking Algeria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, three typical net oil exporters from 1978 to 2018, as the main research objects, this article analyzes the comprehensive effects of oil price, economic development, fixed investment and foreign deterrence on the arms imports of these three countries. Our results show that oil-price volatility can either suppress or boost arms imports, depending on whether security imperatives or budget pressures dominate at a given time and place. For different countries and periods, the two effects may each be significant. We believe that the interests of the governments of net arms exporters and net oil exporters dominate the arms-oil trade relations of the three countries.

ABSTRACT Von der Leyen’s second Commission made reducing firm-level administrative burdens its signature agenda for the European Union (EU). Our analysis showcases how this policy agenda emerged, tracing the dubious methodologies in estimating the costs of administrative burdens, and establishing a novel opening for the “politics of indicators” scholarship. We highlight how the impact of composite indices, such as the administrative burden measurements, can depend on poorly understudied factors that can be external/internal to the issuing organization of an indicator. External factors concern the influence of symmetric countervailing powers (or their absence) in debunking problematic indices. The lower the capabilities collectively possessed by relevant “watchdog institutions,” the more likely methodologically questionable indicators prevail – as occurred with the administrative burden agenda. Internal factors relate to the robustness of an issuing organization’s methodological standards for indicators and the underlying issue complexity/simplicity. We demonstrate how the lack of symmetric opposition propelled the administrative burden agenda, which continues to shape policy within the EU, as well as in the advisory frameworks of the OECD and the World Bank. We underscore how numerical data “travels” between policy domains and agendas, apparent in the convergence of policy scripts on evidence-based policy and administrative burdens in the EU.