With populist parties being established in party systems and, in some countries, even in government, an increasing number of studies are interested in how populism in power affects democratic regimes. Many works focus on the overall effects on democracy, more precisely, the quality of the liberal democratic regime. However, as David Art (“The Myth of Global Populism,” Perspectives on Politics 41[8], 2020) has argued, the extent to which populists affect the quality of democracy or even change the regime remains disputed. Particularly, this applies to public administration. This is more than just a knowledge gap in its own right: Bureaucracy is the apparatus of any regime. It is a common claim that, for instance, the Weimar Republic suffered from a lack of support of monarchist bureaucrats. Contemporary populists in power staff the institutions of the state with their own supporters to maintain loyalty (Takis S. Pappas, “The Pushback against Populism: The Rise and Fall of Greece’s New Illiberalism,” Journal of Democracy 31[2], 2020). Yet to date, there has been no systematic attempt to study the relationship between populism, democratic backsliding, and public administration.

This volume, edited by Michael W. Bauer, B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, Kutsal Yesilkagit, and Stefan Becker, therefore represents a novelty in research on democratic backsliding. It combines two research areas: populism and bureaucracy. The introductory part lays out an ambitious field of research: First, the editors contextualize populist governments’ approaches to bureaucracy in the context of democratic backsliding, not without acknowledging and discussing the limitations of this rather vague concept (pp. 7–8). This said, the initial chapter provides an extensive reflection on populist governments and bureaucracy by sketching three options: (1) sidelining, (2) ignoring, or (3) using the bureaucracy.

One significant advantage of this edited volume is that it does not treat the bureaucracy as a passive “machine,” utilized by the government in a top-down fashion. Rather, the book acknowledges the fact that bureaucracies are “partly autonomous actors,” even if this understanding “goes against some conventional notions” (p. 15). While under “normal” circumstances, the bureaucracy can be expected to work with government reforms (even if these go against the bureaucracies’ self-interest), populists, who join government with a “transformative agenda” (p. 16), represent a specific challenge to the administration, which is the very puzzle that is at the core of the topic.

The contributors to the volume take up a variety of cases from different regions and periods. Except for the analysis of the Weimar Republic’s transition from democracy to the Nazi regime (Strobel and Veit), the chapters cover all relevant cases of democratic backsliding in the recent years, such as Poland (Mazur), Hungary (Hajnal and Boda), the United States (Moynihan), Brazil (Guedes-Neto and Peters), and others. Based on a variety of methodological approaches, the contributions come to fine-grained conclusions that shed light on the understudied question of populism in power and bureaucratic reform/response.

It makes sense to start with the Weimar case: Even if the NSDAP was not a populist party (its communication tactics aside), the transition of the German democratic experiment to a totalitarian state stands out as an example that underlines that “a highly developed Weberian style per se does not determine administrative resilience in processes of liberal-democratic backsliding and in system transformation to authoritarian regimes” (pp. 42–43).

Yet not all cases of illiberal backlash result in similar outcomes regarding the bureaucracy. Take the case of Hungary: Here, patronage and centralization meet a regression in bureaucratic culture, namely “the decline of expertise” as well as “the spread of military-type discipline” while distrust in the bureaucracy, on the one hand, and discontent among public servants, on the other hand, have created fluctuation and a decrease of the ethos of responsibility (p. 97). However, as Hajnal and Boda state, the Hungarian public service is characterized by “autocratic traditions” and in more established liberal democracies, the relationship between the bureaucracy and the populist government could look quite different (pp. 98–99).

Moynihan demonstrates this for the United States under the Donald Trump presidency. While Trump was, in some cases, able to use the bureaucracy and ignored it in others, there were also instances of bureaucratic resilience against his populist agenda. However, it is important to note that “[i]ncompetence and instability among political appointees did more to undermine Trump’s goals than bureaucratic resistance ever could have” (p. 175). Crucially, Trump’s assaults on career officials relied on the role of appointees, which is why the author recommends restricting their number to limit “the degree to which unqualified outsiders can politicize processes,” such as the COVID-19 pandemic (p. 176).

Yet whereas populist governments often do exercise an agenda of bureaucratic reform, the patterns vary as expected in the conceptual outline of the volume. Furthermore, populist approaches to the bureaucracy differ internally: Some agencies are being sidelined, others ignored or used (p. 270).

In the light of the country chapters, Stoker’s contribution deals with the question of how to respond to populism and democratic backsliding in the context of public administration. After a detailed critique on the failures of public administration in response to populism (pp. 258–61), Stoker sketches the outlines of future strategies. Apart from his appeal for a more “political” self-perception of the public service, one of his suggestions speaks directly to populists’ promise of “control” in a less controllable world. Public administration—the government’s very tool of control—should hence abandon its “monopoly of expertise about services” and shift toward a paradigm of “codesign, … with a shared shaping of the problems, joint exercises to stimulate solutions, and a commitment to trialling [sic] options with rapid feedback” (p. 263). For the author, ever more critical citizens and a fragmented media environment pose a challenge to public administration, and for both problems, a more responsive, more participatory public service that includes experts, public servants and citizens represent a desirable solution.

This edited volume is a timely and important one. The editors and contributors have succeeded in illuminating a phenomenon that has so far hardly been studied, and have done so from different perspectives. The underlying concept not only guides the country studies, but can and should also inspire future work. In their conclusion, the editors draft an outline for further research, as the book is just the beginning of a research agenda that attempts to understand the strategies of populists in power (pp. 281–84): Beyond case studies, there is a need for comparative approaches that transfer the individual cases into general explanations. Also, the paradoxes of populist government with a view to its understanding of bureaucracy—such as mixed forms of populism and technocracy—are yet to be explained. Among others, these aspects define possible avenues that should motivate many empirical works to come on the relationship between populism, democratic backsliding, and bureaucracy.