Political Attitudes of Bureaucrats and Regime Transitions

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How do political attitudes of bureaucrats affect the survival chances of the regime they serve? Should bureaucratic personnel be overhauled after an autocratic government collapses? Conversely, do pro-democratic public sector workers help protect democracy? A wrong answer to these questions can be very costly: the removal of officials from the Ba’ath Party in the new Iraqi political system is widely seen as instrumental in fostering the insurgency that spread in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s removal from power in 2003.

Forward-looking transitional justice has assumed that autocratic bureaucrats hold attitudes, beliefs, and are parts of networks, that are incompatible with democracy. Therefore, the argument goes, they need to be removed after an autocratic breakdown. While often transitional justice proceedings concentrate only on punishing the perpetrators of crimes, secret service officers and informants, the implementation of policies of authoritarian regimes is supported by a much wider range of people, down to street-level bureaucrats. It is therefore important to understand their attitudes towards the regime, and how they might affect democratization. Conversely, pro-democratic preferences of public sector workers could be a brake on democratic backsliding.

This panel brings together scholars working on transitional justice, democratization, and public administration to discuss these issues. The four presented papers cover different aspects of the political attitudes of public sector workers and their consequences in the context of regime transitions:

Nalepa and co-authors model the behavior of security apparatus agents following a regime transition under three different behavioral assumptions of preferences of security officers. Predictions from the model are then tested with data on police and security apparatus reforms and crime in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic between 1990 and 2020.

Meyer-Sahling and co-authors seek to identify the determinants of bureaucratic attitudes towards democracy. Their paper draws on survey data from two developing countries in South Asia: Nepal and Bangladesh conducted in 2017 as in-person survey of 1,500 central government bureaucrats in Nepal and 1,100 bureaucrats in Bangladesh.

Rosenfeld argues that the politicization of public employment is an important, if understudied, component of the institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces to challenge incumbents in backsliding democracies. This is supported with evidence primarily from Eastern Europe, lending a better understanding of how governments in countries that once seemed to be the frontrunners of democratization in the region have over the past decade succeeded at concentrating political and economic power.

Piotrowska examines how the dynamics of selection into, and socialization in, public sector jobs in Russia, Poland and East Germany affect political attitudes of bureaucrats, broadly construed. Exploiting the different paths these three countries took with respect to democratization, the paper aims to shed light on the co-evolution of institutional changes and bureaucratic political attitudes.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• The Fate of Post-Authoritarian Security Forces and Democratic Consolidation - Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago

• Determinants of Bureaucratic Support for Democracy in Developing Countries - Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling, University of Nottingham; Christian Schuster, University College London; Kim Sass Mikkelsen, Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University

• Subverting Public Sector Independence as a Threat to Democracy - Bryn Rosenfeld, Cornell University

• Evolution of Bureaucratic Political Attitudes - Barbara Maria Piotrowska, King's College London

Chair

• Joshua A. Tucker New York University

Discussant

• Kohei Suzuki Leiden University