Bureaucracy under pressure: Structural integrity and the ethics of democratic administration

Abstract

We advance the concept of structural integrity as a minimal yet indispensable bulwark against democratic backsliding. Structural integrity offers a normative framework for understanding how public administrations can uphold their democratic commitments when elected governments themselves become sources of distortion. It captures the systemic capacity of administrative institutions to remain aligned with democratically authorized principles even under political pressure. By weaving together legal mandates, professional norms, organizational routines, and cultural safeguards, structural integrity transforms bureaucratic neutrality from traditional passive obedience into a form of bounded normative agency that actively sustains impartiality, accountability, transparency, efficiency, and the rule of law. This conception charts a third path between bureaucratic inertia and politicized resistance, showing how administrative institutions can withstand corrosive populist directives without asserting political autonomy. In this way, structural integrity illuminates how democracy can endure through principled administrative practice, even when the political environment turns hostile to its core values.

Points for practitioners

Structural integrity enables agencies to uphold democratic values under political pressure by sticking to existing statutes, professional standards, and routines. When mandates are vague or leaders demand favoritism, officials can lawfully interpret rules through established norms, document decisions, and publish clear criteria and data to enable oversight. Coordinated use of legal advisors, independent bodies, and open-data reporting can neutralize politicization without obstructing policy. This capacity must be cultivated through institutional design, training, and the continuous reinforcement of internal controls.

Public administration stands at the center of growing tensions in contemporary democracies. Populist and illiberal movements often exploit the language of popular sovereignty to challenge the institutional architecture of liberal democracy, building new elite coalitions and redefining the traditional public service bargains—what officials owe to politicians, what they get in return, and who takes the blame if things turn sour—that sustain bureaucratic autonomy (Hood and Lodge, 2006). By invoking “the will of the people,” they justify measures that ultimately undermine the very norms on which the democratic state rests. Parliaments, courts, and, above all, bureaucracies are portrayed as obstacles erected by distant elites, and their independence is recast as a defiance of the democratic will. Yet we argue that it is within these administrative institutions that the struggle for the survival of democracy takes place. Bureaucracy becomes both target and guardian. It is asked to implement political directives that may erode the very democratic order it is meant to serve. And it must do this while also having to ensure that when principles of legality and impartiality are evoked, they are not used to mask politicization or the abuse of power.

We develop a normative framework for understanding how bureaucratic institutions can uphold their democratic commitments when political authority itself becomes a source of distortion. Our framework allows bureaucracy to do so without turning itself into an autonomous political order. We introduce the concept of structural integrity, which is not an empirical description of bureaucratic behavior, but, rather, a systemic and normative capacity of bureaucracies to remain aligned with democratically authorized principles under conditions of political conflict. Although theoretical in scope, our argument has clear empirical and policy relevance. It offers a lens for understanding how a public administration can respond to political pressure without abandoning its democratic commitments, and it provides guidance for designing institutional safeguards that strengthen the adaptive capacity of democracies under institutional stress.

Structural integrity delineates a systemic, rather than personal, capacity for democratic governance. It depends on institutional designs, legal guarantees, and organizational cultures that discipline discretion within democratically legitimate norms, rather than on individual virtue or resistance. And it should be seen neither as a stable attribute nor as a binary condition. Peters and Pierre (2025) argue that politicization unfolds through interacting top-down and bottom-up dynamics over time. Populist movements construct alternative elite coalitions in political institutions as well as the electorate (cf. Levitsky and Way, 2010; Paxton, 2004: 87–110). Structural integrity is a dynamic form of coherence that enables administrative institutions to remain aligned with democratically authorized principles even under populist and illiberal challenge.

We take the theoretical model of authorized discretion proposed by Bertelli et al. (2025) as a conceptual foundation to clarify the institutional preconditions that allow authorized discretion to operate effectively. Such effectiveness depends on the interaction of three interdependent levels of governance: legal-institutional, organizational, and cultural-professional. Each level embeds democratic authorization into administrative practice, and the contributions of each level are greater than the sum of the parts. At the legal-institutional level, structural integrity relies on safeguards such as the protection of bureaucratic officials from political interference, transparency obligations, judicial review, and codified standards of conduct. At the organizational level, it depends on merit-based recruitment, continuous training, and procedural routines that institutionalize accountability and traceability. At the cultural-professional level, structural integrity is reinforced through ethical socialization, professional networks, and shared norms of impartiality within the administrative community. These dimensions jointly sustain integrity over time, translating the democratic values of authorized discretion into durable institutional practices.

The scope and limits of structural integrity itself are crucial for sustaining democratic administrative practice. As an institution, it can sustain democratic alignment, but that does not preclude applications of structural integrity that are fallible and dependent on context. It is not an immutable feature of an administrative state, but, rather, one that can be strengthened, weakened, and (partially) recovered through design, learning, and professional practice. Integrity persists when democratic principles are institutionally embedded and organizationally reproduced. That is, its temporal dimension is not merely instrumental, but intrinsically valuable to democratic governance because it ensures the continuity and recognizability of democratic norms across time and political change. In hybrid or fully illiberal contexts, it may survive only in part or in aspiration, preserving minimal standards of the principles while losing its full democratic substance. Structural integrity therefore operates not as a prescriptive model but as an analytical and evaluative benchmark. Rather than prescribing a fixed institutional form, it helps to identify the degree to which administrative discretion remains democratically oriented under political strain.

When democratic institutions are exposed to populist disruption, public administrations are drawn into ethical and legal dilemmas. They become battlegrounds of democratic erosion. For this reason, we examine a series of questions crucial for understanding how integrity operates under populist stress. What role should a public administration play when democratically elected governments begin to erode the democratic order itself? Should bureaucracies remain strictly compliant, enacting the directives of the political executive even when such directives compromise democratic norms? Or should they adopt a more assertive stance in defense of constitutional principles and the rule of law?

We think that the prevailing discourse frames the dilemma these questions evoke in overly binary terms, forcing a choice between passive compliance and politically charged resistance. Yet both responses, we argue, risk undermining the very foundations they seek to protect. Passive compliance may enable democratic backsliding under the guise of legality, while active resistance can politicize institutions meant to remain impartial, turning public servants into what O’Leary (2020) calls “guerrilla bureaucrats.” By theorizing structural integrity, we seek to articulate a third way between bureaucratic inertia and politicized resistance: a mode of principled and bounded agency capable of sustaining the democratic commitments of administrative institutions when legality alone no longer suffices.

Populism and the threats to democratic values

To illustrate the stakes of our normative inquiry, it is first necessary to understand populism not merely as a political phenomenon but as a mode of contestation that destabilizes the normative architecture of liberal-democratic governance. Its rise has exposed the fragility of institutional balances once thought to be resilient, especially where democratic legitimacy ¹ is claimed through appeals to the undivided will of “the people” rather than through pluralist justification. Public administration becomes a key battleground in this transformation, as it is increasingly caught between demands for unconditional compliance and pressures to preserve democratic norms.

In today's normative and public policy discourse, few issues can be addressed without reckoning with the profound challenges that the accelerating phenomenon of populism presents to institutional settings, and the ethical tensions it generates within them. Numerous definitions of populism have been proposed. However, populism is neither a coherent ideology nor a specific form of political regime (Mouffe, 2018). It should be understood instead as a mode of political articulation, that is, a strategy for gaining and exercising power, which can take different forms depending upon historical and institutional context (Urbinati, 2019).

Mansbridge and Macedo (2019) identify four core features of populism: a conception of “the people,” framed in morally charged terms, engaged in a struggle or battle against “the elites.” Populism is often characterized as a political logic that juxtaposes the notion of a homogeneous “pure people” with “the corrupt elites.” This antagonism is not merely a critique of those in power but also a deeper normative claim about legitimacy and representation. The people are mostly portrayed as a unified, virtuous collective whose interests are self-evident. This collectivity is articulated through oversimplified claims that the will of this collective ought to be sovereign. The elites, in contrast, are a self-serving and morally compromised minority who have betrayed (or usurped) the authentic voice of the people. This dichotomous framing is at once rhetorical and strategic. Complex political realities are reduced into a binary struggle, and support for this struggle is mobilized through an appeal to shared grievances (against the elites) and collective identity (of the people). The populist construction of “the people” is not a demographic or sociological category, rather, it is a moral and political entity engaged in a struggle for the restoration of popular sovereignty.

This view of populism is not inherently at odds with democratic principles. Under specific conditions, such movements can be forces that correct democratic systems, as when established elites appear disconnected from significant segments of the electorate (Mansbridge and Macedo, 2019). By articulating neglected values, voicing unresolved grievances, and mobilizing emerging social demands, elites may help to reintegrate excluded perspectives into the public agenda and to strengthen democratic responsiveness. Such corrective effects, however, are contingent on context. They may quickly devolve into forms of contestation that undermine the very standards of public justification and pluralist inclusion on which liberal-democratic legitimacy depends.

Populist movements can just as easily exacerbate democratic defects, most prominently when they claim exclusive moral authority to represent “the people,” whose interests are embodied in a charismatic leader (Urbinati, 2019). The people are unified and morally homogeneous, with a coherent and unequivocal “will,” which, writes Müller (2016), leads populist actors to reject the legitimacy of any political opposition on the grounds that no alternative position can authentically represent “the people.” That is, dissent is not seen as a legitimate expression of democratic pluralism; it is a betrayal of the popular will. As this logic takes hold, the principles of liberal democracy bend and break: pluralism is replaced by moral unanimity, opposition is delegitimized, and the rule of law and checks and balances are recast as institutional obstacles imposed by the self-serving “elites.”

This is a structural crisis for liberal democracy. Once disagreement is framed as illegitimate and institutions are stripped of their mediating function, the architecture of democratic governance becomes vulnerable to executive concentration and authoritarian drift. A key manifestation of this process is the systematic weakening of intermediary institutions like political parties, an independent media and public bureaucracies. Rather than rejecting legality outright, populist leaders often operate within its formal parameters, repurposing legal and administrative tools to bypass institutional constraints and to recast them as obstructions to the popular will. Public institutions tasked with ensuring impartiality, accountability, and professional integrity are delegitimized. That is, they are presented not as guardians of democratic legitimacy but as remnants of a self-serving establishment.

A paradigmatic case is Hungary under Viktor Orbán, where populist governance has restructured the administrative state to consolidate executive power. As Enyedi (2018) notes, this transformation was not achieved through overt legal transgression but by recoding the institutional order from within: weakening judicial oversight, subordinating independent agencies, and replacing merit-based bureaucratic recruitment with patronage appointments. What emerges is not the abolition of legality, but its instrumentalization: the form of legal-rational authority is retained while its liberal-democratic substance is progressively dismantled. This case reveals a still deeper pattern: the erosion of liberal-democratic guardrails not through outright illegality, but through the instrumental use of legality itself. When this happens, it is often public institutions—courts, regulatory agencies, independent commissions, and above all the civil service—that are tasked with absorbing this pressure and upholding the normative structure of democratic governance.

These institutions function as normative pillars of liberal democracy, responsible for ensuring that public authority remains anchored in constitutional principles and accountable procedures. Their function is not to block the democratic will, but to structure and to legitimate its exercise. When they lose their credibility or autonomy, democratic governance may persist in form, but it will be substantively hollowed out. It is precisely within these increasingly fragile institutional spaces where legality persists, but legitimacy is strained that the concept of structural integrity becomes indispensable. Bureaucracy lies at the frontline of this normative conflict, where the tension between democratic responsiveness and legal-normative continuity becomes most acute.

Populism as a challenge to bureaucracy

To fully understand the threat populism poses to liberal democracy, it is essential to examine how it disrupts not only electoral or legislative institutions, but also the normative and epistemic foundations of public administration. Bureaucracy is not merely a passive bystander in this process; it is often the first institutional site where populist agendas seek to assert control. Public administrations are among the first institutional targets of populist governments when they take power (cf. Bauer, 2024b; Bermeo, 2016; Yesilkagit, 2021). While civil service capacity is essential for modern governance, populist leaders often seek to undermine its autonomy. They do so through a range of mechanisms such as politicizing appointments, centralizing executive authority, and appropriating administrative resources for their partisan objectives (e.g., Bauer and Becker, 2020; Yesilkagit et al., 2025). Such interventions rarely occur through abrupt or overtly authoritarian means. Instead, they tend to unfold gradually and within the bounds of legality, consistent with what Bermeo (2016) describes as democratic backsliding, a process through which institutional forms remain intact while their democratic substance is progressively drained away. The process of backsliding incorporates “negative strategies” such as cutting budgets, discrediting expert knowledge, dismantling oversight bodies, and placing loyalists in key administrative roles (Bauer and Becker, 2020). Yesilkagit (2021) emphasizes that the liberal-democratic relationship between elected officials and civil servants is at stake, and so is the professionalism, neutrality, and respect for constitutional limits that govern that relationship. When that balance is lost, public administrations become more exposed to political interference and less able to protect the democratic order.

The risks associated with populist interference are not merely institutional but also epistemic and normative (Bauer, 2024b). What is ultimately at stake is not only the structure of administrative institutions, but their capacity to sustain the epistemic conditions of democratic legitimacy. If current trends continue, the ability of public administration to perform its core democratic functions may be severely compromised. Bureaucratic organizations are not simply tasked with implementing policy; they serve as epistemic institutions that help democratic societies reason publicly and govern credibly. Their legitimacy is not based on electoral representation, but on their ability to generate reliable knowledge, provide impartial expertise, and apply standards of justification that are intelligible and contestable in the public sphere (see Falletti 2025). In this sense, public administration contributes to what Estlund (2009) and Peter (2020) describe as the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making. Officials are expected to ground their actions not in personal will or partisan loyalty, but in impersonal, intersubjective criteria—standards of justification that can be assessed according to democratic and epistemic norms—thereby enabling citizens to trust that administrative decisions are responsive to reason, not to arbitrary power. ² Should these functions be eroded, democratic systems may become increasingly vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation. The distinction between informed judgment and ideological assertion may collapse, with dissent no longer perceived as legitimate disagreement but as disloyalty or obstruction. In such a scenario, administrative officials may be pressured to silence their professional judgment, conform to politically convenient narratives, or align with partisan agendas, thereby compromising the integrity of the civil service. This epistemic degradation can have institutional consequences: once professional knowledge loses credibility or independence, even formally legal governance can become substantively arbitrary.

Such developments threaten the institutional balance at the heart of liberal democracy, particularly the relationship between elected representatives and unelected officials. This relationship depends not only on legal accountability, but on mutual epistemic trust and normative restraint. Without that balance, public administration may lose its capacity to act as a stabilizing force in moments of political disruption, and its role as a guardian of democratic reason may be permanently weakened.

The ambivalence of bureaucratic action

The ambivalence of bureaucratic action becomes evident in moments when political authority demands obedience and democratic legality demands restraint. Following the 2020 presidential election in the United States, Georgia's Secretary of State was pressured by then-President Trump, who stated in a now-infamous phone call: “What I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” The Secretary resisted, replying: “Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right” (Fowler, 2021). This episode captures the central dilemma we explore: under conditions of populist pressure, how can public administration remain faithful to democratically authorized norms without turning into a political actor itself? For the foregoing reasons, bureaucratic structure and behavior are essential—indeed decisive—when democratic resilience is threatened. To what extent should public administration intervene in the face of such threats? Should it play an active role? Can it?

The traditional view of the administrative apparatus, conceived as a neutral executor of political directives, tends to answer these questions in the negative (cf. Aberbach et al., 1981; Weber, 1978). Within this framework, the burden of resisting democratic backsliding rests entirely with political institutions and, ultimately, the electorate (Bovens and Wille, 2017). Civil servants, on this account, are expected to remain strictly subordinate: their task is to implement policy decisions impartially, irrespective of their potential normative implications. This is the view Stewart (1975) likened to a “transmission belt” that passively transfers legislative intent into policy outputs without distorting that intent. Here, neutrality applies primarily to the ends of political action, which are determined through popular will, and allows for a degree of discretion in the means of implementation, so long as they remain within legal and professional bounds that make it harder for the ends to be altered. Even the rise of populist governments does not in itself constitute a violation of democratic principles despite the institutional challenges we have been discussing. It is instead a legitimate expression of those principles. The populist leader derives legitimacy from a formal electoral process and may be understood as manifesting the popular will when governing. Any form of resistance by the bureaucracy risks being perceived not as a defense of democratic principles, ³ but as undue interference over democratic sovereignty.

Fifty years ago, Stewart (1975) recognized that American bureaucratic agencies made complex and discretionary choices, faced and absorbed interest group pressure, and were influenced by judicial doctrines that required transparency about, stakeholder participation in, and reasoned explanation of their choices. From this perspective, bureaucracy is not merely a technical apparatus at the service of government, but a structural component of the liberal order, capable of ensuring legality, continuity, and institutional stability even during moments of political crisis. Bureaucracy is a potential “guardian” of democratic integrity; within clearly defined normative and institutional limits, it can counter illiberal developments (Dean, 2025; Fukuyama, 2013; Rothstein and Teorell, 2008).

Other scholars have outlined an even more proactive vision of bureaucratic agency. On this view, public administration is not limited to implementing political decisions, but participates in constructing deliberative spaces, promoting civic participation, and fostering trust-based relationships between institutions and society (Dean, 2025; Sørensen and Torfing, 2018). In this way, bureaucracy emerges as a co-producer of democracy, capable of supporting its evolution toward more inclusive, collaborative, and resilient forms. Rosanvallon (2011) argues that making bureaucratic processes independent of partisan pressures and even electoral dynamics promotes legitimacy through impartiality; that is, the transmission belt is made more problematic by political interference and infrequent elections than by bureaucratic discretion. Allowing citizens and organized interests direct access to independent agencies is a check against moral hazard (in the sense of over-insurance) by elected politicians, which is done by frequently revisiting and critiquing public policy between elections (see Miller and Whitford, 2016). Independence serves this role, for some, even in contexts of backsliding (see e.g., Yesilkagit et al., 2024).

This is where the ethical dilemma resurfaces in sharper terms. Both the deliberative and the autonomous models, although normatively motivated, risk reproducing the very problems they seek to resolve. The deliberative model casts public administration as a facilitator of democratic engagement tasked with promoting civic participation, enabling deliberation, and fostering institutional trust. But by attributing these functions to unelected officials, it introduces a structural ambiguity. Without a clear anchoring in democratic will, administrative actors may overstep their role, blurring the boundary between technical expertise and political representation. What begins as a strategy to strengthen democratic legitimacy may paradoxically result in its erosion, as bureaucratic authority becomes politicized in the name of enhancing democratic participation.

The autonomous model, by contrast, underscores the stabilizing and depoliticizing role of bureaucratic independence. From this vantage, civil servants act as neutral stewards of legality and continuity, safeguarding institutional integrity when political pressures escalate. However, without adequate mechanisms of democratic accountability, this kind of independence risks mutating into technocratic self-referentiality. Bureaucracy, in this view, may cease to function as an instrument of democratic governance and instead assume the role of a normative actor legitimized solely by its own claims to expertise. As Pettit (2023) and Schmidt (2020) caution, this trajectory does not eliminate the domination of citizens by the state; rather, it obscures it behind the façade of technical rationality.

Neither the deliberative nor the autonomous model offers a fully satisfactory response to the ethical and institutional dilemmas posed by democratic erosion. The deliberative model risks bypassing electoral legitimacy in favor of technocratic participation; the autonomous model risks cloaking undemocratic insulation under the guise of neutrality. What is missing is a framework that can reconcile bureaucratic subordination with normative responsibility: a conception of public administration that neither substitutes itself for democratic processes nor withdraws from its duty to uphold constitutional principles.

This impasse is not merely theoretical. As the previous sections have shown, the current wave of democratic backsliding exposes public administration to intense normative pressures. Civil servants are increasingly forced to navigate a landscape in which legality is preserved, but legitimacy is hollowed out. In this space, neither passivity nor assertiveness alone can preserve democratic integrity. What is required, we think, is a principled middle way that avoids the extremes of technocratic overreach and bureaucratic abdication while remaining anchored in democratic norms.

We propose the concept of structural integrity in response to this challenge. Structural integrity aims to capture the normative stance of a public administration that remains formally subordinate to democratic institutions, but which is nonetheless committed to preserving the justificatory standards on which its legitimacy depends. Rather than being a model of resistance or discretion per se, structural integrity offers a regulative ideal: it seeks to define the ethical posture that enables public officials to maintain their commitment to democracy without overstepping their institutional mandate. As we shall argue, structural integrity is not a theory of bureaucratic independence, but of the principled continuity of the democratic state. It is a normative orientation grounded in the idea that public administration must preserve its epistemic and constitutional commitments even when democratic governance is strained by populism, executive overreach, or institutional decay. In what follows, we define its core dimensions and show how it can serve as a conceptual bridge between bureaucratic subordination and democratic responsibility.

Structural integrity

Structural integrity, once again, is a normative and institutional framework through which public administration can preserve its democratic commitments without lapsing into passivity or overstepping its mandate. Far from being a maximalist or transformative ideal, structural integrity is best understood as a minimal but indispensable normative threshold. It is a precondition for democratic resilience that enables bureaucratic institutions to withstand populist pressure. It cannot by itself reverse democratic backsliding, but its absence almost certainly accelerates it. Crucially, structural integrity does not entail the politicization of public administration, nor does it authorize the substitution of democratic decision-making by unelected officials. Rather than conferring political autonomy on bureaucrats, it empowers them to remain faithful to democratically authorized values even under conditions of political distortion or legal ambiguity.

At the core of the concept of structural integrity is a departure from the traditional view of neutrality as mere abstention or technical subordination, in favor of a reinterpretation grounded in the framework of authorized discretion (Bertelli et al., 2025). This refers to an administrative discretion that, while allowing operational latitude, is strictly bound by pre-authorized democratic values and the rule of law (see also Bertelli, 2021; Bertelli and Schwartz, 2023). Authorized discretion rests on two core conditions: the guidance condition, which holds that only democratically legitimate collective decisions can redefine the reference values of the political system; and the authorization condition, which stipulates that public officials may neither introduce nor alter values beyond those defined through democratic processes. In this sense, administrative discretion operates within a perimeter delineated by law and essential democratic principles of impartiality, accountability, the rule of law, transparency, and efficiency.

This reinterpretation of discretion leads to a parallel rethinking of neutrality. In classical models, neutrality was associated with non-intervention: bureaucrats were expected to abstain from normative judgment and to implement political directives mechanically. By contrast, structural integrity redefines neutrality as principled fidelity to a compact set of democratically authorized values and principles, the essentials. This conception rejects the idea of a conflict-free administration. Bureaucratic institutions are inherently arenas of competing interests, norms, and ideologies. Structural integrity does not presuppose their absence but the institutional capacity to manage such conflicts through publicly justifiable standards and procedures. Neutrality, in this sense, is not the absence of politics but its disciplined form—an institutional commitment to justify discretionary action in ways that remain intelligible and contestable within the public sphere.

Bureaucracy, in this light, is not value-neutral; it is normatively anchored in values and principles that derive their legitimacy from democratic authorization. Officials do not act autonomously, but within a closed normative system that limits their discretion to preserving the integrity of democratically validated principles. What changes is not the subordination of bureaucracy to democratic authority, but the understanding of how such subordination can remain meaningful when democratic norms themselves are threatened.

We claim that for these conditions to function effectively, the administrative apparatus must possess structural integrity, which can be understood as the set of institutional, legal, and cultural safeguards that ensure consistency between democratic principles and administrative practices. Within the theory of authorized discretion, structural integrity maintains public administration as a closed normative system: once democratic values are authorized, they are transmitted and preserved through the legal-administrative structure without distortion or interference. Structural integrity does not eliminate the need for judgment or interpretation. It ensures that such interpretation occurs within a bounded normative perimeter, guided by previously authorized democratic values and principles. In this sense, structural integrity can be understood as an institutional foundation for what recent scholarship has reinterpreted as democratic anchoring: not mere responsiveness to political actors but the embedded alignment of unelected institutions with democratically authorized norms (Bauer et al., forthcoming). While democratic anchorage denotes the degree to which public administration remains tied to liberal-democratic values, structural integrity specifies the internal conditions that sustain this anchorage under political stress.

This interpretation also marks a decisive departure from classical understandings of public administration. While the traditional view argued about neutrality as passive obedience to democratically elected authority, structural integrity redefines neutrality as a form of bounded normative agency. Rather than acting merely as an executor of political will, bureaucracy is envisioned as a systemic actor responsible for ensuring coherence between authorized democratic values and administrative conduct. Unlike traditional models that equated legitimacy with electoral authorization, structural integrity introduces a substantive requirement: administrative compliance is warranted only when political directives remain aligned with a compact set of fundamental democratic principles. Neutrality, then, is not abstention, but the active preservation of the democratic order within legally defined boundaries.

Structural integrity is not reducible to legal formalism or individual virtue; it is a systemic property of a democratic state. It emerges from the interplay of formal rules, professional norms, institutional routines, and ethical commitments. It sets itself apart from narrower theories of integrity by emphasizing this interdependence. None of its constituent elements is sufficient on its own, but together they provide the architecture for legitimate, resilient, and normatively coherent administrative action. For these reasons, this quality should be understood not as a binary attribute that institutions either possess or lack, but as a scalar, contextually sensitive condition. Its strength depends on legal robustness, organizational design, political culture, and professional ethos. Recent scholarship has approached bureaucratic resilience through a micro-ethical lens, emphasizing the moral courage of civil servants as a safeguard of democratic values (Kucinskas and Silveira, forthcoming). While such accounts illuminate a moral dimension of administrative agency, the argument developed here departs from their focus on individual virtue. Indeed, structural integrity is not grounded in personal ethics, but, instead, in the systemic coherence of legal, institutional, and professional safeguards that make principled conduct possible in the first place. Bureaucratic behavior is embedded in a web of incentives, norms, and dependencies that may align, or conflict, with democratic purposes. What matters is not the official's motive, but whether discretionary action can be publicly justified within the framework of authorized discretion. When these justificatory structures weaken, integrity erodes—not as a moral lapse, but as a loss of democratic alignment.

While the rule of law remains a foundational principle of democratic governance, its formal existence is not sufficient to prevent democratic erosion. Legal norms can be reinterpreted, selectively enforced, or hollowed out under populist pressure. What structural integrity ensures is that these norms are institutionally embedded, not only as abstract mandates, but as operational commitments internalized through rules, routines and professional culture (see also Bertelli, 2021). In this sense, it transforms the rule of law from a procedural ideal into a substantive practice, capable of resisting manipulation and safeguarding democratic accountability. It ensures that core administrative and democratic principles are not applied selectively or reactively, but simultaneously, so as to function as a mutually reinforcing whole. Each principle requires the stabilizing effect of the others. Recent empirical research supports this interpretation. Machado (forthcoming) shows that the erosion of bureaucratic quality under populist leadership is not a contingent outcome; it is a systemic effect of weakened legal–constitutional safeguards and intensified political polarization. His findings demonstrate that where the rule of law and constitutional oversight are robust, bureaucracies maintain professionalism, impartiality, and resilience. But where these safeguards are eroded, administrative capacity and legitimacy decline in tandem. This evidence reinforces the claim that legality is not merely a procedural constraint on public administration. It is therefore a structural condition of democratic governance sustained by the interdependence of core administrative principles. Only when essential values of legality, impartiality, accountability, transparency, and efficiency operate together can public administration preserve its normative alignment under political pressure while remaining subordinate to democratic authority (Bertelli et al., 2025).

Kirby (2022) notes that institutional integrity, particularly within bureaucratic institutions, may be understood as a robust disposition to pursue objectives efficiently and legitimately, in coherence with normative commitments. In this sense, structural integrity constitutes the internal condition that enables bureaucracy to translate legal norms into impartial, sustainable, and responsible practices. Absent such integrity, the rule of law risks becoming a hollow formality; when present, it becomes an operational foundation capable of resisting politicization and institutional erosion. Ultimately, structural integrity represents an institutional and normative response to the challenge populism poses to democratic governance. When populist leaders seek to erode legal constraints and bureaucratic safeguards in the name of an uncontested popular will, structural integrity enables the administration to resist not by engaging in political confrontation but through principled organizational resilience. First, it operationalizes the rule of law, ensuring that democratic principles such as impartiality and accountability are not abandoned under pressure. Second, it protects against political capture, by reinforcing internal checks, such as codes of conduct, professional standards and continuous training.

Structural integrity offers a third path between bureaucratic inertia and politicized resistance. It enables public officials to act not by asserting political autonomy, but by faithfully enacting democratically authorized norms. It operationalizes the rule of law, protects against political capture through internal safeguards, and it legitimizes bounded agency under conditions of democratic stress. In resisting populist degradation, structural integrity does not replace democracy; it helps to hold it together.

What does structural integrity look like?

To further clarify how structural integrity functions in practice, we illustrate it using two stylized scenarios. These examples are intended not as prescriptive templates, but as empirical instantiations of how integrity-based discretion can preserve democratic values under pressure. Each is designed to illustrate a distinct but complementary dimension of structural integrity: one concerns the normative anchoring of discretion under ambiguous legal mandates, while the other concerns procedural fidelity in the face of direct political interference.

Consider a newly elected populist government that has secured a strong parliamentary majority pledging in the campaign to “restore sovereignty to the people.” The government launches a new vaccination campaign against a seasonal viral disease, issuing a decree that delegates the creation of “vaccination priority groups” to the Ministry of Health. While the decree references “epidemiological criteria,” it also includes a vague provision allowing for the “consideration of territorial directives as articulated by local political authorities.” The Minister of Health, a close political ally of the Prime Minister, verbally instructs senior officials in the Ministry to prioritize “native families” in regions that “supported the government's renewal project,” and to deprioritize “non-integrated communities.” Although the legal text is ambiguous, internal administrative guidelines, previous legislation, and professional protocols enshrine the principle of universal, non-discriminatory access to essential health services.

In response to this directive, senior civil servants activate a coordinated institutional strategy. A technical report is drafted and publicly released, interpreting the legal mandate in accordance with established norms and reaffirming that priority must be based strictly on medical and epidemiological risk, without discriminatory exclusions. Transparency mechanisms are promptly employed: the criteria and implementation plans are published on the Ministry's open data platform, ensuring public accessibility and scrutiny. Simultaneously, the legal affairs unit consults an independent human rights body; while its opinion is non-binding, its public disclosure reinforces the administration's interpretation grounded in non-discrimination. Weekly data updates further enhance accountability, enabling both citizens and the press to monitor vaccine allocation in real time.

The Prime Minister responds by denouncing these actions as “bureaucratic sabotage” and signals an intent to remove disloyal officials. However, the combination of internal procedural consistency, external transparency, and normative anchoring generates significant public support for the administration's stance. As a result, the attempt to politicize vaccine distribution loses momentum without escalating into direct confrontation. This case exemplifies how structural integrity functions under conditions of interpretive ambiguity and normative pressure.

This case exemplifies structural integrity in action: the administration neither oversteps its democratic mandate nor passively enables its erosion. Its resilience stems not from individual acts of resistance, but from a system of interlocking norms, routines, and institutional safeguards that collectively uphold the guidance and authorization conditions of bureaucratic legitimacy. This episode operationalizes the logic of authorized discretion. The discretion exercised by the Ministry remains firmly bound to democratically sanctioned values which guide both the interpretation and the implementation of the political mandate. Officials do not substitute their own values for those of the elected government; rather, they interpret ambiguous directives within a normative framework already legitimized through prior democratic authorization.

Now consider a country that has just had an election in which a populist party narrowly won a majority of parliamentary seats but also handily won a supermajority of local councils. Its platform included the issuance of a massive housing subsidy to homeowners. Existing law creates a housing agency governed by law that requires grants to be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis and that applications be submitted through the agency's website. Staff in the agency are recruited by merit and subject to performance reviews. They have a norm of promptly publishing data on any funds they distribute.

In a public speech, the new Prime Minister announces a formal directive that the housing agency prioritize requests that are endorsed by local politicians to implement its promised homeowner subsidy more quickly. Agency staff accept applications endorsed by local politicians, but queue them chronologically. They indicate any political endorsements in an existing “notes” field. The program manager invokes the first-come, first-served statutory mandate in a memorandum to the treasury that requests it to stop any disbursements that do not have time-stamped records of their submission through the agency's website. Comporting with its norm of prompt publication, agency staff produce grant disbursement information daily, which allows journalists and interested citizens to see whether the government is making good on its promise. The data show that is not despite the prime minister's effort to expedite grants, and this contributes greatly to a decline in government satisfaction in opinion polls.

Each of these actions is consistent with structural integrity, but they emphasize different operational dimensions. First, very administrative action is traceable to pre-existing statutes, internal rules or norms. These are not ad hoc or “guerrilla” actions of resistance, so the closed normative system of structural integrity is respected. Second, the successful resistance from the housing agency depended on a combination of a faithful reading of the application timing rule (legality), oversight (accountability), maintenance of statutory rule when conflicted by a non-statutory directive (impartiality), avoiding improper disbursements (efficiency), and open data (transparency). Without adhering to all of the essential principles, the Prime Minister's directive would likely have shaped a different outcome. Third, the housing agency neither sabotaged the policy nor engaged in politicized resistance to it. Rather than resisting through institutional obstruction, the agency upheld democratic integrity by adhering to a normatively closed system of authorized discretion, thereby neutralizing politicization through transparency and procedural fidelity.

Rather than offering a rigid blueprint, these stylized cases highlight the adaptive logic of structural integrity across different institutional contexts. What they reveal is not a formulaic response, but a mode of normative resilience, that is, a capacity to uphold democratic commitments even under political pressure and without slipping into politicization or passivity.

Structural integrity should nevertheless not be understood as a static attribute or a guaranteed safeguard. It is a dynamic capacity that depends on the continuous reinforcement of internal controls, professional standards and normative alignment. It must be cultivated through institutional design, professional education and organizational learning. Structural integrity is not simply a defensive mechanism against populist pressure, it is also a constitutive feature of democratic governance, without which even the most robust legal frameworks risk becoming vulnerable to erosion. As such, strengthening structural integrity should be viewed not as an act of bureaucratic resistance, but as a form of democratic stewardship.

Conclusion

We have explored how contemporary bureaucracies can uphold democratic commitments when they face pressure from political actors seeking to undermine liberal-democratic norms. In this context, we have argued that the concept of structural integrity offers a particularly fitting response to the challenges facing contemporary democracies—especially given the insidious pressure populism exerts on the stability of the administrative order. It provides a normative framework that reconciles the imperative to defend democratic values with the non-elective nature of the bureaucracy, offering a “third way” between passive inertia and politicized activism.

Rather than insulating public administration from politics, structural integrity seeks to ensure that discretion is exercised within a framework of democratically authorized values: impartiality, legality, accountability, transparency, and efficiency. When coherently embedded in the legal and organizational fabric of institutions, these values allow bureaucracies to act with integrity—not in opposition to politics, but in service of a constitutional democratic order. Neutrality, we contend, requires principled fidelity to public norms rather than non-participation in official duties.

Structural integrity is not a binary attribute that institutions either possess or lack. Nor can it be assumed to arise spontaneously. It is better understood as a graduated and historically situated institutional condition, shaped by varying degrees of legal robustness, organizational design, professional culture, and political leadership. In well-established democracies, where these elements are often aligned, structural integrity can be developed and sustained. In more fragile settings that are marked by polarization, clientelism, or weak norms of impartiality, it may remain aspirational, vulnerable to politicization or institutional capture. These differences do not imply that structural integrity is the privilege of established democracies. Rather, they highlight the need to understand it as a variable condition that can be built, eroded, or recovered through political and institutional action. More fundamentally, this understanding reveals that structural integrity should be treated not merely as an internal bureaucratic quality, but as a relational condition shaped by the broader political and institutional ecology. The same formal safeguards may operate differently depending on levels of polarization, party dynamics, or civil society engagement.

This variability should not be seen as conceptual weakness, but, rather, as an invitation to investigate the concept more systematically. Treating structural integrity as a graduated, context-sensitive phenomenon opens fertile ground for both theoretical and empirical inquiry. Comparative studies can examine how different institutional configurations affect its emergence and resilience. Legal and administrative research can explore how norms of discretion are codified, practiced or undermined. Public administration scholars can identify the organizational and cultural preconditions for integrity, and the factors that threaten or reinforce it.

Understanding structural integrity as we have articulated it calls for a sequence of shifts from an abstract ideal to an institutional project, and from a static condition to a dynamic achievement. Some democratic orders may exhibit only partial or precarious forms of structural integrity, for instance, enough to delay breakdown, but not enough to prevent incremental erosion. Mapping these “twilight zones” of integrity can help us to better understand how illiberal governance coexists with the formal trappings of legality. Only when embedded in real institutional practices can structural integrity anchor the administrative function in a durable democratic order.