Conclusion and Lessons: Democratic Backsliding as Administrative Reconfiguration Across Regimes, Regions, and Governance Orders

This concluding chapter synthesises insights from the volume to reconceptualise democratic backsliding (DB) as a process of administrative reconfiguration rather than institutional decay alone. Drawing on cases from Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, East Asia, and Africa, the chapter demonstrates that DB unfolds through the strategic reshaping of political–administrative relationships, where authority, discretion, legitimacy, and loyalty are reorganised within and beyond the state. Rather than following a single trajectory, DB manifests across diverse post-democratic orders – from consolidated antiliberal regimes to externally imposed authoritarian absorption, hybrid patronage systems, and heterarchical postcolonial governance arrangements. Across these contexts, the bureaucracy emerges as the central battleground of democratic change. DB is enacted not primarily through constitutional reform, but through the politicisation of appointments, erosion of meritocracy, weakening of oversight institutions, and the repurposing of administrative systems for ideological or executive consolidation. The chapter highlights how discretion is not simply centralised but redistributed, diffused, or embedded in ways that undermine accountability while preserving procedural legitimacy. It further shows that bureaucratic norms – neutrality, professionalism, and meritocracy – are reinterpreted within shifting moral economies of governance, where loyalty increasingly displaces impartiality as a core administrative value. While instances of bureaucratic resistance exist, they are highly conditional and erode as contestation diminishes. The chapter concludes that safeguarding democracy requires moving beyond institutional design to strengthening the administrative, normative, and historical foundations that sustain democratic practice. Public administration is democracy’s operating system; its transformation is therefore central to understanding – and confronting – the contemporary dynamics of democratic erosion.