Lobbying the bureaucracy in times of backsliding populism

The decline in democratic quality, emergence of (semi-)authoritarian regimes and electoral popularity of populist and/or illiberal political parties are among the most notable phenomena around the globe in the past 20 years (Way & Levitsky 2020; Mechkova et al 2017). Various countries once considered on track towards pro-western liberal democracy such as Hungary and Poland have experienced waves of "democratic backsliding", resurgences of national conservativism and "Caesarian" strongman politics (Sata & Karolewski 2019). Democratic backsliding also inspired two new strands of research in political science and public administration. In political science, a growing body of literature explores how democratic backsliding is re‐shaping the linkages between governments and civil society, in particular organized interests. In public administration, scholars have also recently discovered democratic backsliding and authoritarian populism as a fruitful area of research (e.g. Rockman 2019). Most notably, Bauer et al. (2021) elaborate on how populist governments pursue varying strategies vis-à-vis the public bureaucracy, depending on their context-specific motives and political ambitions. This article aims to build a bridge between these two emerging strands of research. Considering that illiberal populism is having tangible effects on both interest groups and public administration, there are reasons to assume that democratic backsliding and/or populism will also affect the relationships between bureaucracies and organized interests. After all, populist governments often seek to undermine state neutrality (Enyedi 2016), monopolize state institutions and exercise public power mainly for private gain (Sata & Karolewski 2019). Against this backdrop, we interested in how democratic backsliding impacts the relationships between national regulatory agencies – as a key part of national public administrations – and organized interests. While regulatory agencies are generally attributed a politically neutral status, it is long known that they may be subject to "regulatory capture" (Yackee 2014) by powerful organizations. While scholarship on how illiberal and/or populist governments leverage the bureaucracy is growing (Peters & Pierre 2019; Box 2022), little is known about how interactions between interest organizations and public administration are affected by such changes. Do relationships between bureaucrats and civil society change when populists rule and/or democratic quality declines? Is there a "run" on the formally less ideologically laden public bureaucracy when access to formal political channels of influence (e.g. parliaments) decreases or becomes overparticized? Do organizations ideologically in line with governing illiberal or populist parties have privileged access to regulatory bodies? Are expertise-sharing organizations still able to access regulatory bodies? And how contingent are such interactions on the type of populism (e.g. technocratic, authoritarian) and pre-existing public administration traditions? To address these questions, we draw on a new survey dataset, which grasps relationships between organized interests and political institutions (i.e. governments, parties, regulatory agencies, parliaments) in four post-communist countries (Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovenia), which have recently experienced, to different degrees, waves of populism and democratic backsliding.