Enhancing the Resilience of Democratic Administrative Cultures to Resist Autocratization

Many democracies around the world face the challenge of democratic recession and autocratization as democratically elected incumbents increasingly show autocratic tendencies. Existing research has mainly focused on the circumstances under which these autocratizing incumbents erode democracy and on the structural factors explaining the resilience of democratic institutions. Much less has been written about how democratic administrative cultures can help resist autocratization and about how their resilience can be enhanced.
Democratic resilience requires specific governance institutions, practices and policies. While the concrete institutional setup varies, resistance from within government institutions, notably mechanisms of horizontal accountability such as an independent judiciary and rule of law, a strong political party system, as well as a functional electoral regime providing opportunities for meaningful political participation, are important. However, the most commonly highlighted sources of resilience are the political culture, the administrative culture and civil society. The presence of “social resisters” within the administration willing and able to organize resistance to democratic stress and authoritarian challenges could be the game changer in such times.
In this Panel we look forward to papers that describe the actors, the techniques and institutions within the administration that can resist autocratization. The Panel encourages paper writers to discuss how both individuals in democratic administrative cultures and administrative institutions can resist autocratization and what retributions they face when they stand up against the autocratizing incumbent to defend democracy. Papers may also focus on what actions domestic and international actors can take to prevent (further) democratic recession. The Panel would like inquiries into policymakers’ ability to respond to unexpected and destabilising events that arise from the chaos and complexity due to erosion of democracy. Some questions that need to be addressed are: How can an overarching resilience framework be applied to enhance administrative support to democratisation? What concrete policies and approaches can be implemented? And how might future methods be applied to support this? What could be the role of the administration in helping policymakers to identify appropriate resilience-enhancing measures and the circumstances in which resilience-enhancing measures should be implemented?