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First published online : 09 January 2020 ; 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.

In recent decades, many countries ranging from quasidemocratic regimes to well-established democracies have faced democratic backsliding. In this study, we draw on Foa and Mounk and other related literature to examine the effects of regime delegitimation on democratic backsliding, focusing on youth's trust in political institutions—parliament, legal systems, and political parties—relative to trust of the older population. We use an unbalanced panel data set that combines a country-year indicator of liberal democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project with aggregate survey-based measures of absolute and relative institutional trust from the Survey Data Recycling database; the data set covers 46 countries from 2009 to 2017. We find that the ratio of youth's institutional trust to that of older persons has a substantive effect on the quality of liberal democracy in the future, and that the effect is amplified by the relative size of the youth population.

Why have most African countries not achieved greater political liberalization? What explains the lack of progress toward the ideals of liberal democracy across the region? This book advances ongoing debates on democratic backsliding with specific reference to Africa. In examining how incumbent leaders in African countries attempt to contain societal pressures for greater democracy, the chapters explain how governments go beyond the standard tools of manipulation, such as electoral fraud and political violence, to keep democracy from unfolding in their countries. The book emphasizes two distinct strategies that governments frequently use to reinforce their hold on power, but which remain overlooked in conventional analyses; —the legal system and the international system. It—documents how governments employ the law to limit the scope of action among citizens and civil society activists struggling to expand democratic liberties, including the use of constitutional provisions and the courts. The work further demonstrates how governments use their role in international relations to neutralize pressure from external actors, including sovereigntist claims against foreign intervention and selective implementation of donor-promoted policies. While pro-democracy actors can also employ these legal and international strategies to challenge incumbents, in some cases to prevent democratic backsliding, the book shows why and how incumbents have enjoyed institutional advantages when implementing these strategies through the six country case studies of Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

In this article, we offer insights into the plurality of interest groups' strategic responses to the socially, politically, and economically transformative phenomenon of democratic backsliding. For the purpose of the article, the term "ideational plurality" has been coined to refer to a plurality of interest groups' ideas leading their activities in general and their choice of strategies concerning the government in particular (attitudinal and behavioural aspects). Two policy fields and two types of interest groups engaged in an institutionalised social partnership - advocacy NGOs (operating in the environmental policy field) and economic groups (trade unions) - are studied comparatively in Slovenia using a mixed‐methods approach. The key findings are that strategic responses to democratic backsliding vary between environmental NGOs and trade unions, as do their ideational plurality, and that environmental NGOs' ideational plurality damages their potential to struggle against democratic backsliding. In contrast, trade unions' ideational homogeneity enables them to jointly struggle against governmental destruction of one significant segment of democratic order (institutions of social partnership) without demanding that the government step down for misusing the Covid‐19 pandemic to establish a system of governance that resonates with Viktor Orbán's ideas of illiberal democracy.

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record ; Both political parties and differentiated integration (DI) play an ambivalent role in regard to democratic backsliding. Parties' positioning towards democratic backsliding has not always been straightforward, and DI has been seen as facilitating it. We analyse whether party actors view democratic backsliding as a problematic issue for the EU, if they think DI facilitates it, and how they consider the EU should respond to it. Drawing on 35 interviews and a survey of 42 party actors in seven member states, we show that many do view backsliding as problematic. Moreover, around half worried that DI could facilitate backsliding, though others did not link the two. Finally, almost all considered it legitimate for the EU to address democratic backsliding. Although centre-of-left actors are most likely to worry about democratic backsliding and favour EU intervention, actors across the political spectrum are sceptical about accepting DI in matters pertaining to Article 2. ; European Commission

In this article, we offer insights into the plurality of interest groups' strategic responses to the socially, politically, and economically transformative phenomenon of democratic backsliding. For the purpose of the article, the term "ideational plurality" has been coined to refer to a plurality of interest groups' ideas leading their activities in general and their choice of strategies concerning the government in particular (attitudinal and behavioural aspects). Two policy fields and two types of interest groups engaged in an institutionalised social partnership—advocacy NGOs (operating in the environmental policy field) and economic groups (trade unions)—are studied comparatively in Slovenia using a mixed‐methods approach. The key findings are that strategic responses to democratic backsliding vary between environmental NGOs and trade unions, as do their ideational plurality, and that environmental NGOs' ideational plurality damages their potential to struggle against democratic backsliding. In contrast, trade unions' ideational homogeneity enables them to jointly struggle against governmental destruction of one significant segment of democratic order (institutions of social partnership) without demanding that the government step down for misusing the Covid‐19 pandemic to establish a system of governance that resonates with Viktor Orbán's ideas of illiberal democracy.