Populist attitudes among civil servants: A source of liberal robustness?

Abstract

This study examines civil servants’ normative orientations toward democracy, focusing on the absence of populist attitudes as a potential source of resilience against democratic backsliding in public administration. Drawing on the concept of democratic anchoring, we expect civil servants and public sector employees to display lower levels of populism than their private-sector counterparts. Panel data from Germany confirm this expectation and show that the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes persists despite an overall increase in populism between 2021 and 2023. A complementary cross-national analysis of 16 democratic states reveals robust evidence for such a gap only in Germany and Austria. Both countries witnessed the collapse of constitutionally fully developed interwar democracies. We discuss whether the experience of a democratic breakdown may have left a lasting imprint on civil servants’ democratic attitudes in these countries. We further discuss how such imprints may shape behaviors that support administrative resilience against illiberal threats.

Points for practitioners Only in Germany and Austria do civil servants exhibit systematically lower populist attitudes than private-sector employees, indicating that the public workforce could function as a source of democratic resilience. However, populist attitudes are increasing overall, including within the public sector, highlighting the importance of democratic education and training. Strengthening collective and protected channels for expressing reservations about illiberal political demands could help civil servants respond more effectively and confidently.

Keywords

populism anti-elitism illiberal public policy public/private sector gap

Introduction

How do civil servants respond when populists come to power: by resisting illiberal decisions or by acting as neutral agents serving their political principals? With the rise of populist parties in western democracies and the capture of political and administrative offices by illiberal leaders, this question has gained urgency. Accordingly, administrative research has increasingly focused on the normative foundations of bureaucratic behavior amid democratic backsliding (Bauer et al., 2021; Bellodi et al., 2024; Lotta et al., 2024).

Democratic backsliding is commonly described as the gradual erosion of democratic standards by populist governments (Waldner and Lust, 2018). It entails the incremental delegitimization of pluralism and the undermining of democratic institutions (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). Its drivers and consequences have become central themes in research on democratic regression (e.g., Broockman et al., 2023). Democratic backsliding does not stop at the political sphere; it directly affects public administration. Illiberal political leaders often perceive the bureaucracy as a legacy institution aligned with technocratic elites or opposition interests (Bauer, Brandsen et al., 2025). Backsliding in public administration implies a normative shift away from democratic accountability and expertise-based legitimacy toward authoritarian rule. Populist governments pursue this shift by curtailing the separation of powers, extending control over judicial and administrative bodies, and politicizing the civil service through the appointment of loyalists (Bauer, Lotta et al., 2025). These dynamics raise a fundamental question about the vulnerability of public administrations to backsliding (Peters and Pierre, 2019; Ripoll and Schott, 2024).

This study examines the capacity of public administration to safeguard democratic governance through the concept of democratic anchorage. In this view, bureaucracy is not merely a technocratic instrument but also a liberal institution in its own right (Bertelli and Falletti, 2025; Bertelli and Schwartz, 2022) and a guardian of democratic integrity (Yesilkagit et al., 2024). The concept of anchoring captures the extent to which public administration remains normatively and institutionally tied to democratic principles. Strong anchoring exists where institutions cultivate a cultural commitment to pluralism and enable legitimate decision-making (Bauer, Brandsen, et al., 2025). This study focuses on civil servants’ normative orientations toward democracy, specifically their lack of populist attitudes, which is regarded as part of the micro-foundations of democratic anchorage.

A growing literature on backsliding in public administration has examined the pressures bureaucracies face under populist governments (Box, 2022; Peters and Pierre, 2019, 2025; Rockman, 2019), as well as whether such governments undermine the preconditions of democratic public bureaucracies, including judicial independence and the transparency of decision-making (Borins, 2018; Michener, 2023). Sidelining the bureaucracy through patronage and excluding bureaucrats from decisions and information have been identified as strategies to bypass administrative decision-makers. These studies provide important insights into how illiberal political behavior exerts pressure on public administration, but they focus mainly on the macro- and meso-levels (Machado, 2025). Micro-level research investigating civil servants’ responses to illiberal demands in concrete decision-making contexts (Guedes-Neto and Guy Peters, 2021), often drawing on the seminal working, shirking, and sabotage model (Brehm and Gates, 1999), remains scarce. Although there is extensive literature on public/private sector differences with respect to specific work motivation such as Public Service Motivation (PSM) (Wise and Szücs, 1996), social preferences (Tepe and Vanhuysse, 2017), political attitudes (Knutsen, 2005), and voting behavior (Geys and Sorensen, 2022; Jensen et al., 2009), little is known about whether, and to what extent, populist attitudes are present among public sector employees (see Bednarczuk (2025), Ripoll (2025), and Van Acker (2020) for notable exceptions).

The rationale for this research endeavor is straightforward. Populist attitudes are strongly associated with support for illiberal-populist parties (Mudde, 2007; Müller, 2016). For illiberal-populist governments to pose a threat to the democratic administrative state, it is precisely necessary for civil servants to accept such attacks on the legitimacy of the administration tacitly. Whether civil servants speak out against illiberal policies can depend on many different institutional factors (e.g., Bauer, 2024) and individual characteristics (e.g., DeHart-Davis, 2007). In this study, we focus on the role of populist attitudes among civil servants. It is assumed, ceteris paribus, that civil servants with populist attitudes are less likely to resist illiberal administrative demands from populist governments. The empirical question at the heart of this study is whether civil servants are less likely to exhibit populist attitudes and thereby provide a potential source of resilience against illiberal political demands.

Testing this argument presents several challenges. Measuring populist attitudes accurately is complex, as populism is a multi-dimensional construct. Moreover, distinguishing between different types of public sector employees is crucial, as civil servants and public employees may differ in their exposure to bureaucratic norms. Our analysis accounts for these challenges by drawing on novel panel data and extensive cross-national survey data. First, we analyze data from the first and second waves¹ of the German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP) (Gerlitz et al., 2024). The SCP (Wave 1) provides a representative sample of the German population and includes a measure of populist attitudes, enabling us to construct a detailed classification of the public sector workforce. Second, to examine whether the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes extends beyond Germany, we replicate the analysis using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Module 5 (Comparative Study of Electoral, S., 2023), comparing 16 countries.

Theoretical expectation: a public/private sector gap in populist attitudes?

The idea that normative beliefs sustain democracy dates back to early studies of the collapse of interwar democracies. The seminal civic culture study by Almond and Verba (1963) demonstrated that democracy flourishes when citizens’ attitudes toward political will formation align with democratic rule. Contemporary research on populism reverses this focus by examining attitudes that undermine democracy (Mudde, 2007; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). Whereas Mudde (2004) conceptualizes populism as a thin-centered ideology that lacks a comprehensive worldview and instead attaches itself to thicker ideologies such as nationalism, socialism, or conservatism, Müller (2016) conceptualizes populism as an inherently anti-pluralist and thus illiberal worldview. Populist attitudes reflect agreement with the notion that society consists of two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the “good” people and the “bad” elites (Hawkins et al., 2018). Thus, populists frame politics as a struggle between a virtuous people and a corrupt elite, in which the popular will is the only legitimate source of political decision-making. When adopted by political actors, populist attitudes facilitate democratic backsliding by legitimizing efforts to weaken institutional checks, undermine pluralism, and erode judicial or bureaucratic independence (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). The diffusion of populist attitudes among elites and citizens has thus provided a normative foundation for illiberal reforms and the erosion of democratic institutions (Haggard and Kaufman, 2021; Lührmann and Lindberg, 2019).

Research on public administration under conditions of democratic backsliding has developed along two main strands, focusing on both the impact on and the responses of those working within government (Gilad et al., 2025). The first strand examines the strategies employed by political actors who seek to undermine democratic institutions, particularly in their efforts to influence or control the civil service (Bauer, 2024; Bauer et al., 2021). The second strand investigates how bureaucrats themselves respond to these threats (Guedes-Neto and Guy Peters, 2021; Hollibaugh et al., 2020). This study examines civil servants’ normative orientations toward democracy as a potential source of bureaucratic resilience. With few exceptions, empirical research has paid limited attention to differences in illiberal populist attitudes between public and private sector employees. Bednarczuk (2025) links public sector employment to authoritarian personality traits, using the Child Trait scale as a proxy for authoritarian dispositions, and finds higher levels among public employees in the United States. However, this measure may inadequately capture illiberal attitudes toward the political system, which are central to assessing bureaucratic resilience, and the findings may be limited to this country. Drawing on the European Social Survey (ESS), Van Acker (2020) examines public/private sector differences across a range of political attitudes and finds largely similar views among public and private sector employees. Although these attitudes relate to the political system, they neither capture populism as an illiberal worldview directly nor rely on established measures of authoritarianism.

The idea that administrative institutions and their employees are tied to democratic values such as participation, accountability, inclusion, and responsiveness is key to the concept of democratic anchorage (Morlino, 2005; Sørensen and Torfing, 2005). Two main perspectives exist. The first stresses intermediary institutions, parties, unions, and associations as channels linking elites and society (Morlino, 2005). The second defines democratic anchorage as a multi-dimensional construct, comprising control by elected officials, representation of organized constituencies, accountability to the public, and adherence to democratic norms of conduct (Sørensen and Torfing, 2005). Anchoring emphasizes that civil servants’ democratic orientations are expected to reinforce democratic legitimacy, especially under conditions of contestation (Bauer, Brandsen et al., 2025). In this sense, civil servants’ democratic orientations are proposed as a potential source of resilience against backsliding in public administration (Bauer, Lotta et al., 2025; Stoker, 2021; Yesilkagit et al., 2024). Resilience against illiberal threats rests not only on institutional safeguards but also on the democratic attitudes of public servants. As central actors in public administration, civil servants play a critical role in upholding democratic governance and the rule of law. If they display lower levels of populist attitudes than other societal groups, they may function as a stabilizing force against illiberal pressures that seek to erode legal-administrative processes. Public/private sector differences in populist attitudes can emerge through at least two distinct mechanisms. The first is self-selection, as individuals with stronger commitments to democratic values and the rule of law may be more likely to pursue careers in the public sector. The second mechanism is socialization. Specialized education programs for public service, as well as professional experience within public administration, may reinforce bureaucratic norms, legalistic modes of decision-making, and commitments to democratic accountability, thereby reducing civil servants’ susceptibility to populist rhetoric. Both mechanisms converge on the same theoretical expectation:

H1. Civil servants and public sector employees display lower levels of populist attitudes than private sector employees.

The baseline hypothesis (H1) is refined along a temporal and cross-sectional dimension. If civil servants hold distinct normative commitments to democracy, reflected in lower populist attitudes, this gap should remain stable over the medium term (H1.1), and it should also persist across different democratic regimes (H1.2). If illiberal governments endure, the public/private sector gap may reverse, as public administration careers become increasingly attractive to populist-oriented citizens. Hence, the gap is expected to show only medium-term stability. In cases of full democratic breakdown, civil servants’ attitudes are likely to realign with the new authoritarian order, either opportunistically or due to removal from office. The public/private sector gap may thus reverse in non-democratic regimes, as populist-oriented citizens are drawn to public employment under populist leadership.

Longitudinal evidence: the case of Germany

Data and method

The German SCP (Gerlitz et al., 2024) provides a representative sample of the German population and includes both a measure of populist attitudes and a detailed classification of the public sector workforce, allowing a distinction to be made between general public sector employees and civil servants. This distinction matters because the two groups differ in the legal nature of their employment, with civil service involving specific privileges and obligations such as duties of service and loyalty. First, respondents were asked whether they work in the public sector, and second, they were asked about their status as civil servants. We combined both measures to create a variable distinguishing those who reported not working in the public sector (private sector), those who reported working in the public sector but did not indicate civil servant status (public sector employees), and those who identified themselves as civil servants (civil servants). Based on Schulz et al. (2018), populist attitudes are described as a pattern of attitudes consisting of three dimensions:

1. Homogeneity of popular will refers to an understanding of the people as homogeneous and virtuous.

2. Anti-elitism denotes the view that political elites are corrupt and deceitful, and betray the people.

3. Popular sovereignty captures the belief in unrestricted power vested in the people.

These three dimensions were measured using three items for each dimension (Appendix Table A1).

The SCP data were collected in 2021 and 2023. In Germany, 2021 coincided with the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, marked by extensive lockdowns and restrictions on civil liberties. Politically, the pandemic culminated in the emergence of the anti-state Querdenker protest movement (Plümper et al., 2021). Although the movement faded after 2022, it served as a rallying point for right-wing populist and far-right supporters seeking to delegitimize the democratic constitutional state. This development coincided with rising support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which initially endorsed restrictive Corona measures but later became a vocal critic of government policies. The AfD's vote share increased from around 10% in 2021 to 22% in 2023 (Infratest-dimap, 2025). During this period, skepticism toward the state and populist parties gained substantial political and social traction. In order to improve comparability between sectors, the sample includes only employees; that is, those who are currently working full- or part-time in the public or private sector. Those who are registered unemployed, in further education, retraining, additional vocational training/rehabilitation, or in retirement/early retirement are excluded from the analysis.

Results

The measure of populist attitudes constructed here as an arithmetic means of nine items of the populism scale of Schulz et al. (2018) has sufficient internal consistency (Wave 1: α = 0.86, Wave 2: α = 0.87); the same is the case for measures of anti-elitism (Wave 1: α = 0.77, Wave 2: α = 0.80), homogeneity (Wave 1: α = 0.88, Wave 2: α = 0.83), and popular sovereignty (Wave 1: α = 0.88, Wave 2: α = 0.89), each measured with three items. Figure 1 reports the distribution of the populism score for respondents working in the private sector, working in the public sector as employees, and civil servants in 2021 and 2023. It shows that in both years populist attitudes are lower among public sector employees and civil servants, compared to private sector employees.

Figure 1.

Distribution of populist attitudes by type of employment sector.

Table 1 presents the mean populism scores and the mean scores for the three sub-dimensions of the populism scale, based on unbalanced panel data from Wave 1 (2021) and Wave 2 (2023). First, whereas the gap between public and private sector employment in populist attitudes remains strong for anti-elitism among public employees and civil servants, the gap for public employees becomes very small in the case of popular sovereignty and homogeneity of popular will. For civil servants, however, the gap remains. Second, the comparison of the two points in time shows that the gap between the public and private sectors in populist attitudes has remained stable.

Table 1.

Mean by populist sub-dimensions and types of employees.

	Populism		Anti-elitism		Popular sovereignty		Homogeneity
	Mean; 2021	Mean; 2023	Mean; 2021	Mean; 2023	Mean; 2021	Mean; 2023	Mean; 2021	Mean; 2023
Civil servant	2.89	2.93	3.49	3.47	2.83	2.89	2.35	2.43
Public employee	3.09	3.13	3.63	3.70	3.13	3.17	2.50	2.52
Private employee	3.25	3.32	3.79	3.86	3.34	3.42	2.63	2.69
Cross-s group comparisons
Civil versus public	−0.191 p = 0.000	−0.199 p = 0.000	−0.131 p = 0.04	−0.226 p = 0.000	−0.293 p = 0.000	−0.275 p = 0.001	−0.15 p = 0.044	−0.095 p = 0.222
Civil versus private	−0.360 p = 0.000	−0.394 p = 0.000	−0.295 p = 0.000	−0.390 p = 0.000	−0.506 p = 0.000	0.527 p = 0.000	−0.28 p = 0.000	−0.265 p = 0.000
Public versus private	−0.169 p = 0.000	−0.196 p = 0.000	−0.163 p = 0.000	−0.164 p = 0.000	−0.213 p =.000	−0.253 p = 0.000	−0.13 p = 0.002	−0.170 p = 0.000

Note. Unbalanced panel, Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference (HSD) test.

The next step is to test the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes by estimating random (RE) and fixed effect (FE) models on a balanced panel for 2021 and 2023. RE estimates capture between-person differences, whereas FE estimates identify within-person change (Greene, 2019: 447). Because identification in the FE models relies on individuals who change sectors, a relatively rare event among civil servants in our data (Appendix Table A2), Table 2 reports results from both estimators. The RE models show that compared to private sector employees, public employees and civil servants report significantly lower levels of populism. This observation applies to the populism score and the three sub-dimensions of populist attitudes. The FE models support the descriptive findings from Table 1 that public employees’ and civil servants’ populist attitudes remained mostly stable between 2021 and 2023 and increased less strongly over time than those of their private sector counterparts. The significant coefficient for the 2023 wave dummy shows that populist attitudes rose generally over time, beyond individual characteristics. Although populist attitudes increased significantly among German citizens between 2021 and 2023, the gap between populist attitudes among public and private sector employees remained stable. Still, civil servants exhibit the lowest populist scores across all sub-dimensions. This means that public sector employees and civil servants also became marginally more populist and are therefore not immune to general societal trends in attitudes. However, the structural difference in attitudes remained: public sector employees and civil servants report less-populist attitudes than private sector employees.

Table 2.

Determinants of populist attitudes (balanced panel regression).

	Model 1a	Model 1b	Model 2a	Model 2b	Model 3a	Model 3b	Model 4a	Model 4b
	Composite populism score		Anti-elitism		Popular sovereignty		Homogeneity of popular will
	RE	FE	RE	FE	RE	FE	RE	FE
Public employee (ref. private)	−0.098***	−0.088***	−0.105***	−0.062	−0.122***	−0.107**	−0.069***	−0.080
	(0.019)	(0.034)	(0.022)	(0.044)	(0.029)	(0.054)	(0.024)	(0.053)
Civil servant (ref. private)	−0.162***	−0.116	−0.163***	−0.206*	−0.236***	−0.132	−0.080*	0.003
	(0.033)	(0.094)	(0.038)	(0.123)	(0.050)	(0.151)	(0.041)	(0.148)
Female (ref. male)	0.010	−0.037	0.021	0.123	0.033	−0.211	−0.028	−0.024
	(0.018)	(0.094)	(0.020)	(0.123)	(0.027)	(0.151)	(0.022)	(0.147)
Other gender	0.084	0.432	0.073	0.104	0.426*	1.100**	−0.330	0.090
	(0.166)	(0.295)	(0.198)	(0.386)	(0.256)	(0.473)	(0.219)	(0.463)
Age 31–40 (ref. 18–30)	−0.004	−0.104**	0.030	−0.152**	0.048	−0.060	−0.070**	−0.118
	(0.026)	(0.048)	(0.031)	(0.062)	(0.040)	(0.077)	(0.034)	(0.076)
Age 41–50	−0.106***	−0.175***	−0.042	−0.216**	−0.064	−0.077	−0.201***	−0.255**
	(0.030)	(0.066)	(0.035)	(0.086)	(0.046)	(0.105)	(0.038)	(0.104)
Age 51–60	−0.137***	−0.163**	−0.053	−0.227**	−0.083*	−0.047	−0.278***	−0.239*
	(0.030)	(0.080)	(0.035)	(0.104)	(0.046)	(0.127)	(0.038)	(0.125)
Age 61+	−0.148***	−0.168*	−0.014	−0.207*	−0.094*	−0.004	−0.331***	−0.282*
	(0.036)	(0.093)	(0.042)	(0.121)	(0.055)	(0.148)	(0.046)	(0.146)
Lower secondary education (ref. Less than lower secondary education)	0.014	0.028	0.216***	0.221	−0.043	0.101	−0.091	−0.237
	(0.063)	(0.106)	(0.075)	(0.139)	(0.097)	(0.170)	(0.083)	(0.167)
Upper secondary education completed	−0.211***	0.114	0.093	0.237	−0.301***	0.207	−0.425***	−0.123
	(0.065)	(0.115)	(0.077)	(0.151)	(0.100)	(0.185)	(0.085)	(0.181)
Post-secondary non-tertiary education completed	−0.150**	0.075	0.191**	0.264*	−0.285***	0.079	−0.333***	−0.129
	(0.066)	(0.115)	(0.079)	(0.150)	(0.102)	(0.184)	(0.087)	(0.180)
BA	−0.338***	0.124	−0.061	0.245	−0.434***	0.217	−0.519***	−0.105
	(0.068)	(0.122)	(0.081)	(0.160)	(0.105)	(0.196)	(0.090)	(0.192)
MA or PhD	−0.530***	0.095	−0.187**	0.224	−0.682***	0.239	−0.709***	−0.214
	(0.065)	(0.124)	(0.077)	(0.162)	(0.100)	(0.199)	(0.085)	(0.195)
East Germany (ref. West)	0.156***	−0.084	0.162***	−0.037	0.219***	0.065	0.081***	−0.280
	(0.019)	(0.120)	(0.022)	(0.157)	(0.029)	(0.192)	(0.023)	(0.188)
Social ladder: own position	−0.065***	−0.016**	−0.082***	−0.029***	−0.083***	−0.021*	−0.043***	−0.002
	(0.005)	(0.007)	(0.006)	(0.009)	(0.008)	(0.011)	(0.007)	(0.011)
Divorced or separated (ref. Married)	0.151***	0.052	0.115***	−0.036	0.242***	0.003	0.089**	0.197*
	(0.031)	(0.068)	(0.036)	(0.088)	(0.047)	(0.108)	(0.039)	(0.105)
Single	−0.060***	−0.018	−0.064**	0.044	−0.054	−0.026	−0.064**	−0.062
	(0.022)	(0.054)	(0.025)	(0.070)	(0.033)	(0.086)	(0.027)	(0.085)
Widowed	0.039	0.013	−0.041	−0.081	0.083	−0.174	0.045	0.294
	(0.068)	(0.125)	(0.079)	(0.164)	(0.103)	(0.201)	(0.087)	(0.197)
Same-sex partnership	−0.118	0.019	0.054	0.262	−0.186	−0.238	−0.343**	0.043
	(0.109)	(0.140)	(0.135)	(0.184)	(0.171)	(0.225)	(0.153)	(0.220)
Wave 2 (ref. Wave 1)	0.075***	0.066***	0.078***	0.079***	0.077***	0.067***	0.078***	0.060***
	(0.009)	(0.010)	(0.011)	(0.013)	(0.014)	(0.016)	(0.014)	(0.015)
Constant	3.730***		4.030***		3.890***		3.350***
	(0.077)		(0.092)		(0.118)		(0.101)
Observations	7749	7749	7822	7822	7831	7831	7804	7804
R ²	0.273	0.022	0.212	0.019	0.171	0.014	0.136	0.011
Adjusted R²	0.271	−1.420	0.210	−1.410	0.169	−1.420	0.133	−1.440

Note. RE: random effects; FE: fixed effects; standard errors in parenthesis. *p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01. Hausman tests were statistically significant for all model comparisons.

Examining the set of socio-demographic and political control variables (Rico and Anduiza, 2019), we find that populist attitudes decrease with both education and social status in the balanced panel regression models. Respondents from East Germany report significantly higher levels of populism on all three sub-dimensions. Additional models based on Wave 1 also included respondents’ ideological self-placement (Appendix Table A3). Consistent with previous studies, we find that respondents with right-leaning ideological orientations report higher levels of populism. More importantly, the inclusion of these variables in the model does not alter the observed public/private sector gap in populist attitudes.

Probing deeper on public sector occupations and conditionalities

Public sector employment encompasses a wide range of occupations that may involve distinct types of work experience. Some occupations are unique to the public sector, such as judges, police officers, and firefighters, whereas others can technically exist in the private sector but are predominantly found in public institutions (e.g., teachers). Additionally, there are occupations, particularly in the health sector, that are commonly found in both the public and private sectors. Public sector occupations may place a different emphasis on duty and loyalty to democratic constitutions. To account for these sector-related occupational differences, we constructed an additional measure. Based on the International Standard of Occupations (ISCO)-08 classification, we constructed a categorical variable distinguishing between private sector employees; public sector employees in administrative, education, or social service, health, and security-related occupations (including police, armed forces, and firefighters); and a residual category covering all remaining occupations (see Appendix Table A4). The estimation results summarized in Figure 2 (Appendix Table A5) show that, compared to private sector employees, in administrative occupations are significantly and substantively less likely to express populist attitudes. The same pattern holds for public employees working in education, social services, and security-related occupations such as the military, police, and fire services. However, this association is not observed among public employees in health-related occupations. Thus, although the size of the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes varies and is more pronounced among core public administration employees, the gap is not restricted to this particular group of public sector employees.

Figure 2.

Employment sector and populist attitudes (Wave 1, 2021) coefficients.

Furthermore, the size of the gap might depend on civil servants and public employees’ exposure to the public sector employment. To test the robustness of the association between the type of public employment and the populism score, we estimated a model in which the employment sector interacts with the respondent's age. Unfortunately, the German SCP dataset does not include information on the duration of public employment, only on the respondent's age. Figure 3 shows that the composite populism score declines among civil servants when their age increases from 18 to 65. A similar negative conditional relationship is not observed among private sector employees. Public employees’ populism score is also not conditioned by their age. However, the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes becomes more pronounced among elderly civil servants. We also tested for conditional relationships with education and ideological self-placement on the left-right scale, but none of these analyses revealed any significant effects (Appendix Figures A1–A2).

Figure 3.

Effect of employment sector on composite populism score conditioned by age (Wave 1, 2021).

A premise of this study is that self-reported populist attitudes are behaviorally consequential. An indirect test of this assumption is to examine the effect of populist attitudes on party preferences using Wave 1 of SCP. Although the AfD has undergone substantial transformation since its founding in 2014, its current party profile has been classified as far-right, right-wing populist, and national conservative (Pytlas and Biehler, 2024). We estimated a multinomial regression of self-reported populism scores on voting intentions, with results presented in Appendix Table A6 and Appendix Figure A3. Compared to those intending to vote for the Social Democrats (SPD), higher populism scores increase the likelihood of supporting the Liberal Party (FDP), the Left Party (Die Linke), and the AfD, and decrease the likelihood of supporting the Conservatives (CDU) and the Greens (Die Grüne). These patterns suggest that self-reported populism scores are meaningful in the sense that they align with respondents’ partisan preferences.

In sum, the fine-grained longitudinal analysis reveals a persistent public/private sector gap in populist attitudes, with civil servants consistently exhibiting lower levels in populism than private sector employees, despite an overall rise in populism in Germany between 2021 and 2023. This raises the question of whether we are observing a case of German exceptionalism. Germany's unique historical trajectory, marked by a democratic breakdown in 1933 and democratic re-education in West Germany after 1945, may have shaped the collective memory and institutional foundations that make its public administration more resilient to populist appeals. The next section extends the analysis beyond Germany to examine whether a public/private sector gap in populist attitudes also emerges in other democracies.

Cross-national evidence: comparing 16 democratic states

Data and method

To investigate the relationship between public sector affiliation and populist attitudes from a cross-national perspective, this study leverages data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Module 5 (CSES, 2023). This endeavor comes at the expense of a less fine-grained measure of public sector affiliation and of populist attitudes. The independent variable is self-reported sector affiliation, distinguishing between individuals working in the public sector and those in the private sector, with mixed and third-sector employment excluded. The CSES does not allow for a more fine-grained distinction between types of public employment contracts (e.g., civil servants vs public employees). The CSES does not include an item battery to measure all three sub-dimensions of populist attitudes (Akkerman et al., 2014; Schulz et al., 2018). However, based on the framework suggested by Jungkunz et al. (2021), we construed a measure of anti-elitists attitudes based on seven items. These items were previously explored and utilized in the work of Castanho Silva et al. (2020) and Wuttke et al. (2020). Although there is no final answer to the question of whether this set is most appropriate to measure populist attitudes, there is a consensus that anti-elitism is a key feature of populism (Müller, 2016). Respondents holding anti-elitist views tend to perceive politicians and governing parties as selfish, corrupt, and detached from the concerns of ordinary citizens, while endorsing the belief that strong, rule-defying leadership is necessary to achieve effective governance. The wording of the items is summarized in Appendix Table B1 (α = 0.747). To control for potential confounding effects, the analysis includes respondents’ age, gender, education, ideological orientation, and respondents’ perception of the national economy as control variables (Rico and Anduiza, 2019).

The cross-sectional analysis focuses on a sub-sample of 16 countries selected to represent different administrative traditions and world regions. Administrative traditions are long-standing patterns that shape how public administration is organized and functions (Peters, 2021). Although the number of traditions and their distinctiveness remain a matter of scholarly debate (Jugl, 2025), the typology can help capture relevant variance in institutional context. The Anglo-American tradition emphasizes common law, managerialism, and a politically responsive civil service. The Napoleonic tradition features a centralized, hierarchical bureaucracy with strong legal formalism. The Germanic tradition prioritizes rule-bound administration, legal rationality, and an independent professional bureaucracy. The Nordic tradition combines bureaucratic professionalism with participatory governance and high public trust. The post-socialist tradition reflects the legacy of state socialism, with continuing reforms toward decentralization and transparency. A second rationale for the country selection is to ensure broad regional representation, particularly by including younger democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin America, which are often considered more susceptible to democratic backsliding (Przeworski et al., 2000). On this basis, we select the 16 countries summarized in Table 3.

Table 3.

Administrative traditions and world regions.

Tradition/region	Countries	Liberal Democracy Index
Napoleonic	France, Italy, Portugal	0.795
Weberian	Germany, Austria, Switzerland	0.823
Scandinavian	Finland, Denmark, Norway	0.857
Anglo-American	UK, USA, Canada	0.771
Central East European	Hungary, Poland	0.474
Latin America	Brazil, Mexico	0.515

Varieties of Democracy (VDem) Project Liberal Democracy Index average for 2014–2024. See Appendix Table B2.

Results

Figure 4 summarizes the results of an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model where an additive index of the seven anti-elitism items serves as the dependent variable (Appendix Table B4). The independent variable of key interest is a public/private sector dummy, which is interacted with the country sample. The country-specific estimates, therefore, represent conditional marginal effects derived from a common model rather than independent hypothesis tests. A first inspection of the effects of the control variables corroborates previous findings: anti-elitist views are less prominent among respondents with higher levels of education and more pronounced among those who place themselves further to the right ideologically (Appendix Table B3). In substantive terms, three findings emerge from Figure 4. First, anti-elitist attitudes vary considerably across the 16 countries, all of which were democracies at the time of the survey. Low levels of anti-elitist attitudes are found in Norway, Finland, and Denmark, while high levels are observed in Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil. Second, the public/private sector gap in anti-elitist attitudes can be replicated for Germany. Third, except for Germany and Austria, none of the remaining 14 countries shows a robust public/private sector gap in anti-elitist attitudes.

Figure 4.

Employment sector and anti-elitist attitudes using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) country sample.

As part of the robustness analysis, we re-ran the cross-national analysis using a single anti-elitism indicator as the dependent variable; namely, respondents’ agreement with the statement “Having a strong leader in government is good for [COUNTRY] even if the leader bends the rules to get things done” (Appendix Figure B1). We again find a robust pattern for Germany and Austria, but a reversed pattern in Hungary. In Hungary, support for this statement is significantly higher among public sector employees than among those in the private sector. A similar reversal appears in Brazil, though it does not reach conventional levels of significance. This finding indicates that the public/private sector gap in anti-elitist attitudes may attenuate or even reverse under conditions of prolonged top-down politicization (Peters and Pierre, 2025). In this case, the reservoir of resilience that may once have existed, or that may still exist in Germany and Austria, could eventually be depleted with the continued endurance of illiberal political leaders.

Discussion and conclusions

Drawing on the concept of democratic anchorage (Bauer, Brandsen et al., 2025; Bellodi et al., 2024) and previous empirical evidence on public employees’ democratic attitudes (Bednarczuk, 2025; Van Acker, 2020), this study argues that civil servants in established democracies exhibit fewer populist attitudes, thereby serving as a potential source of resilience against illiberal demands. The empirical examination of this assertion yields the following results.

We began by analyzing data from the first and second waves of the German SCP, a representative survey of the German population that includes measures of populist attitudes and detailed classifications of public sector employment. Results can be summarized in three points: first, there is a public/private sector gap in populist attitudes as civil servants and public sector employees have significantly lower overall populism scores than private sector employees (H1). Second, although the size of the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes is more pronounced among core public administration employees, it is not restricted to this particular group of public sector employees. Third, public sector employees and civil servants are not immune to the general increase in populist attitudes in Germany between 2021 and 2023 (H1.1), but the structural populism gap between the public and private sectors persists. In a second step, we examined whether the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes extends beyond Germany and holds across regions and administrative traditions (H1.2). To this end, we replicated the analysis using data from the CSES Module 5 (CSES, 2023). Comparing 16 countries representing five administrative traditions and different world regions, we find that the public/private sector gap in anti-elitist attitudes is robust only in Germany and Austria. In addition, cross-validating the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes using CROss-National Online Survey-2 (CRONOS-2) data from the ESS (see Appendix C) confirmed the non-finding for other countries.

A key question raised by these results is what explains the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes observed in Germany and Austria. Our preliminary explanation is grounded in the idea that historical events, even when falsely remembered (Haffert et al., 2021), can shape political culture, understood as acceptable norms and conceptions of roles, in the long term. The experience of hyperinflation in 1923 left a lasting trauma in Germany, fostering a culture of economic stability, characterized by strong inflation aversion and a consensus on budgetary restraint, which continues to have important political consequences today (Feldman, 1993). The democratic breakdown in which the civil service of a democratic state became a compliant instrument of fascist dictatorship, rather than a source of resistance or democratic defense (Feldman and Seibel, 2005), could be regarded as a trauma of public administration culture in Germany and Austria. Unlike Italy's limited and elite-driven parliamentary system, Germany and Austria witnessed the collapse of constitutionally fully developed interwar democracies (Paxton, 2005). This experience likely strengthened incentives to construct constitutional safeguards such as “defensive democracy” but also to foster a culture of democratic commitment among civil servants. In addition, following the defeat of Nazi Germany, both countries underwent Allied-led “re-education” programs aimed at embedding democratic values and preventing authoritarian relapse (Feldman and Seibel, 2005). School curricula, civil service law, and administrative training were restructured to emphasize constitutional loyalty and democratic norms. Given the highly institutionalized nature of civil service training, these policies may have had a lasting impact on civil servants’ political system beliefs. Although the notion of re-education remains contested, this interpretation would also be consistent with Morlino's (2005) concept of democratic anchorage as a top-down mechanism of regime support. However, further comparative in-depth historical analysis would be required to evaluate the explanatory power of this approach.

A subsequent explanation for the continued presence of the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes in Germany and Austria could be that individuals with stronger democratic commitments are more likely to be attracted to public sector careers. A limitation of this study is that we cannot empirically disentangle the extent to which the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes is driven by institutional factors as opposed to self-selection. Experimental research designs (Gilad et al., 2025) offer a promising avenue for advancing our understanding of populism and self-selection into government employment, as well as for identifying when and how the public/private sector gap in populist attitudes might reverse (Peters and Pierre, 2025). In a similar vein, it could be fruitful to extend research on the relationship between civil servants’ work motivation and populist attitudes (e.g., Schuster et al., 2021). At a general level, elements of populist rhetoric, such as an emphasis on serving “the people”, may resonate with certain aspects of PSM. However, we conceptualize populism as an inherently anti-pluralist and thus illiberal worldview (Müller, 2016), and, based on this understanding, we would agree with Ripoll and Schott (2024) and expect PSM to be more likely to be negatively correlated with populist attitudes. Empirical research on the micro-foundations of PSM, suggesting that PSM is rooted in commitments to social equity and fairness (Tepe and Vanhuysse, 2017), tends to aligns with this expectation. Unfortunately, we are unable to test these expectations, as doing so would require data that simultaneously capture sector of employment, populist attitudes, and PSM within a single survey, a requirement that is not met by the data currently available to researchers.

Finally, it is necessary to assess whether the observed public/private sector gap in populist attitudes has meaningful behavioral implications. One way to approach this question is by distinguishing between different types of behavioral responses to political directives, such as compliance, shirking, or sabotage (Brehm and Gates, 1999). Bednarczuk (2025) shows that authoritarian attitudes among U.S. civil servants are associated with support for stricter measures in response to perceived threats to the country, such as wiretapping. In the German context, future research could examine whether populist orientations affect civil servants’ likelihood of remonstration. Under German public administration law (§ 63(2) Bundesbeamtengesetz; § 36 Beamtenstatusgesetz), remonstration refers to the legal duty of civil servants to object to instructions they consider unlawful. In practice, however, remonstration is rarely invoked, presumably because civil servants fear negative consequences. Another perspective on the behavioral implications of a public/private sector gap in populist attitudes would be to focus on the thresholds and informational processes within public organizations that shape when civil servants who disagree with illiberal political moves shift from silent acquiescence to action, regardless of the specific form that action ultimately takes. Examining this transition from dissatisfaction to action could productively draw on approaches such asNoelle-Neumann's (1983) spiral of silence and may help policymakers think more systematically about institutional instruments that enable civil servants to express reservations about illiberal policies collectively rather than individually.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-ras-10.1177_00208523261434833 - Supplemental material for Populist attitudes among civil servants: A source of liberal robustness?

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ras-10.1177_00208523261434833 for Populist attitudes among civil servants: A source of liberal robustness? by Markus Tepe and Ekaterina Widmer-Lytkina in International Review of Administrative Sciences

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and to Anne Speer for her assistance with data preparation and the merging of the different waves of the German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP).

ORCID iDs

Markus Tepe

Ekaterina Widmer-Lytkina

Funding

Ekaterina Widmer-Lytkina was supported by the Central Research Development Fund (CRDF) of the University of Bremen. No other financial support was received for this research, authorship, or publication.

Data policy statement

Data from the German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP) Wave 1 (2021), the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Module 5 (C2023), and the CROss-National Online Survey-2 (CRONOS-2) dataset (2024) from the European Social Survey (ESS) are publicly available. To access data from the German SCP Wave 3 (2023) (Gerlitz et al., 2024), please contact fgzdz@uni-bremen.de. The replication syntax is available here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VTOCWF

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Note

1. The analysis utilizes Waves 1 and 3 of the SCP, as both incorporate the same measure of populist attitudes (Schulz et al., 2018). For the sake of clarity, these are hereafter referred to as Waves 1 and 2.

Author Biographies

Markus Tepe is a Professor of Political Science at the SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen. His research focuses on public-private sector differences, political decision-making, and behavioral public policy.

Ekaterina Widmer-Lytkina is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen and an Associate Researcher at the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC). Her research focuses on psychological and sociological explanations of populism, perceived inequalities, and social injustice.

References

Akkerman

Mudde

Zaslove

(2014) How populist are the people? Measuring populist attitudes in voters. Comparative Political Studies 47(9): 1324–1353.

Almond

Verba

(1963) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bauer

(2024) Public administration under populist rule: Standing up against democratic backsliding. International Journal of Public Administration 47(15): 1019–1031.

Bauer

Brandsen

Sørensen

, et al. (2025) (De-)anchoring bureaucracy in liberal democracy: administrative reforms between illiberal drift and democratic renewal. International Review of Administrative Sciences. Forthcoming: IRAS Special Issue: Mapping Bureaucratic Transformation in Polarized Polities: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Reform, Robustness, and Regression.

Bauer

Lotta

De Holanda Schmidt

(2025) Bureaucratic militarization as a mode of democratic backsliding: Lessons from Brazil. Democratization 32(3): 595–613.

Bauer

Peters

Pierre

, et al. (2021) Democratic Backsliding and Public Administration: How Populists in Government Transform State Bureaucracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bednarczuk

(2025) U.S. against the world: Authoritarianism among American public servants. Australian Journal of Public Administration 84(1): 172–183.

Bellodi

Morelli

Vannoni

(2024) A costly commitment: Populism, economic performance, and the quality of bureaucracy. American Journal of Political Science 68(1): 193–209.

Bertelli

Falletti

(2025) Bureaucracy under pressure: Structural integrity and the ethics of democratic administration. International Review of Administrative Sciences. Online first. doi: 10.1177/00208523251406200. IRAS Special Issue: Mapping Bureaucratic Transformation in Polarized Polities: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Reform, Robustness, and Regression.

10.

Bertelli

Schwartz

(2022) Public Administration and Democracy: The Complementarity Principle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11.

Borins

(2018) Public sector innovation in a context of radical populism. Public Management Review 20(12): 1858–1871.

12.

Box

(2022) Context matters: Authoritarian populism and public administration practice, teaching, and research. The American Review of Public Administration 52(7): 475–485.

13.

Brehm

Gates

(1999) Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

14.

Broockman

Kalla

Westwood

(2023) Does affective polarization undermine democratic norms or accountability? Maybe not. American Journal of Political Science 67(3): 808–828.

15.

Castanho Silva

Jungkunz

Helbling

, et al. (2020) An empirical comparison of seven populist attitudes scales. Political Research Quarterly 73(2): 409–424.

16.

Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (2023) CSES Module 5 Full Release. (ZA7557; Version 5.0.0) [Data set]. Köln: GESIS. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7804/cses.module5.2023-07-25 (accessed 15 October 2024).

17.

DeHart-Davis

(2007) The unbureaucratic personality. Public Administration Review 67(5): 892–903.

18.

Feldman

(1993) The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation 1914–1924. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

19.

Feldman

Seibel

(2005) Networks of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucrats, Business, and the Organization of the Holocaust. New York: Berghahn Publishers.

20.

Gerlitz

Axenfeld

Cornesse

, et al. (2024) The German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP): Theoretical background, instruments, survey design, and analytical potential. Available at: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/tew78 (accessed 15 October 2025).

21.

Geys

Sorensen

(2022) Public sector employment and voter turnout. American Political Science Review 116(1): 367–373.

22.

Gilad

Sulitzeanu-Kenan

Levi-Faur

(2025) A taste for government employment also rests on its political flavor. Public Administration Review 85(5): 1412–1425.

23.

Greene

(2019) Econometric Analysis: Global Edition. London: Pearson.

24.

Guedes-Neto

Guy Peters

(2021) Working, shirking, and sabotage in times of democratic backsliding: An experimental study in Brazil. In: Bauer

Peters

Pierre

, et al. (eds) Democratic Backsliding and Public Administration: How Populists in Government Transform State Bureaucracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 221–245.

25.

Haffert

Redeker

Rommel

(2021) Misremembering Weimar: Hyperinflation, the Great Depression, and German collective economic memory. Economics & Politics 33(3): 664–686.

26.

Haggard

Kaufman

(2021) Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

27.

Hawkins

Carlin

Littvay

, et al. (2018) The Ideational Approach to Populism: Concept, Theory, and Analysis. London: Routledge.

28.

Hollibaugh

Miles

Newswander

(2020) Why public employees rebel: Guerrilla government in the public sector. Public Administration Review 80(1): 64–74.

29.

Infratest-dimap (2025) ARD Deutschlandtrend. Available at: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschlandtrend/archiv (accessed 15 October 2025).

30.

Jensen

Sum

Flynn

(2009) Political orientations and behavior of public employees: Across-national comparison. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 19(4): 709–730.

31.

Jugl

(2025) Patterns of bureaucracy: Conceptualizing administrative traditions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 35(3): 277–291.

32.

Jungkunz

Fahey

Hino

(2021) How populist attitudes scales fail to capture support for populists in power. Plos One 16(12): e0261658.

33.

Knutsen

(2005) The impact of sector employment on party choice: A comparative study of eight West European countries. European Journal of Political Research 44(4): 593–621.

34.

Levitsky

Ziblatt

(2018) How Democracies Die: What History Reveals about Our Future. New York: Crown.

35.

Lotta

Tavares

Story

(2024) Political attacks and the undermining of the bureaucracy: The impact on civil servants’ well-being. Governance 37(2): 619–641.

36.

Lührmann

Lindberg

(2019) A third wave of autocratization is here: What is new about it? Democratization 26(7): 1095–1113..

37.

Machado

(2025) Bureaucratic backwards and its conditions: A comparative study with panel data 2009–2022. International Review of Administrative Sciences. IRAS Special Issue: Mapping Bureaucratic Transformation in Polarized Polities: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Reform, Robustness, and Regression.

38.

Michener

(2023) Transparency versus populism. Administration & Society 55(4): 671–695.

39.

Morlino

(2005) Anchors and democratic change. Comparative Political Studies 38(7): 743–770.

40.

Mudde

(2004) The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition 39(4): 541–563.

41.

Mudde

(2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

42.

Müller

J-W

(2016) What Is Populism?Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

43.

Noelle-Neumann

(1983) The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

44.

Norris

Inglehart

(2019) Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

45.

Paxton

(2005) The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Penguin Books.

46.

Peters

(2021) Administrative Traditions: Understanding the Roots of Contemporary Administrative Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

47.

Peters

Pierre

(2019) Populism and public administration: confronting the administrative state. Administration & Society 51(10): 1521–1545.

48.

Peters

Pierre

(2025) “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”: Understanding politicization in the populist era. International Review of Administrative Sciences 91(2): 202–219.

49.

Plümper

Neumayer

Pfaff

(2021) The strategy of protest against COVID-19 containment policies in Germany. Social Science Quarterly 102(5): 2236–2250.

50.

Przeworski

Alvarez

Cheibub

, et al. (2000) Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

51.

Pytlas

Biehler

(2024) The AfD within the AfD: Radical right intra-party competition and ideational change. Government and Opposition 59(2): 322–340.

52.

Rico

Anduiza

(2019) Economic correlates of populist attitudes: An analysis of nine European countries in the aftermath of the great recession. Acta Politica 54(3): 371–397.

53.

Ripoll

(2025) Is there evil in European public bureaucracies? An exploratory study on the manifestations of illiberal attitudes among civil servants. International Review of Administrative Sciences. IRAS Special Issue: Mapping Bureaucratic Transformation in Polarized Polities: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Reform, Robustness, and Regression.

54.

Ripoll

Schott

(2024) Responding to unethical demands by one’s leader: The role of public service motivation. International Journal of Public Administration 47(14): 990–1000.

55.

Rockman

(2019) Bureaucracy between populism and technocracy. Administration & Society 51(10): 1546–1575.

56.

Schulz

Müller

Schemer

, et al. (2018) Measuring populist attitudes on three dimensions. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 30(2): 316–326.

57.

Schuster

Mikkelsen

Correa

, et al. (2021) Exit, voice, and sabotage: Public service motivation and guerrilla bureaucracy in times of unprincipled political principals. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 32(2): 416–435.

58.

Sørensen

Torfing

(2005) The democratic anchorage of governance networks. Scandinavian Political Studies 28(3): 195–218.

59.

Stoker

(2021) Public administration: How to respond to populism and democratic backsliding. In: Bauer

Peters

Pierre

, et al. (eds) Democratic Backsliding and Public Administration: How Populists in Government Transform State Bureaucracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 246–266.

60.

Tepe

Vanhuysse

(2017) Are future bureaucrats more prosocial? Public Administration 95(4): 957–975.

61.

Van Acker

(2020) Right-wing populist attitudes among European public servants – a cross-country comparison. Public Policy and Administration 35(4): 485–506.

62.

Waldner

Lust

(2018) Unwelcome change: Coming to terms with democratic backsliding. Annual Review of Political Science 21: 93–113.

63.

Wise

Szücs

(1996) The public/private cleavage in a welfare state: Attitudes toward public management reform. Governance 9(1): 43–70.

64.

Wuttke

Schimpf

Schoen

(2020) When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: On the conceptualization and measurement of populist attitudes and other multidimensional constructs. American Political Science Review 114(2): 356–374.

65.

Yesilkagit

Bauer

Peters

, et al. (2024) The guardian state: Strengthening the public service against democratic backsliding. Public Administration Review 84(3): 414–425.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.18 MB