Regulating access to public services: administrative state responses in Britain

We are said to live in an age of democratic turbulence. Increasingly personalised political parties attract electoral support by campaigning on the basis of rejecting existing institutions of liberal democracy. These campaigns include calls advocating that bureaucracy should be more ‘responsive’ to the ‘average voter’. This paper explores the extent to which changes in institutions have been made in view of such a changing political environment. This paper focuses on one particularly critical aspect that characterises the populist interest in bureaucracy, namely the ways in which citizens can access public services. This paper explores how the frontline encounter between administrative state and citizen in the UK has changed over the course of the past two decades, exploring the extent to which there have been distinct attempts at ‘connecting’ the administrative state to citizens the might be identified as populist.