(De-)anchoring bureaucracy in liberal democracy: administrative reforms between illiberal drift and democratic renewal

Liberal democracies face mounting pressures from systemic transformations and emerging illiberal political forces, placing public administrations at a critical juncture. This introduction to the Special Issue “Mapping bureaucratic transformation in polarized polities: Comparative perspectives on democratic reform, robustness and regression” conceptualizes bureaucratic transformation along a continuum from democratic anchorage to democratic backsliding in public administration, capturing how administrative reforms can either reinforce or erode liberal-democratic governance. Drawing on normative theory and comparative empirical analysis, the contributions to the Special Issue examine how bureaucracies are reshaped by populist strategies and institutional vulnerabilities. This introductory article presents a heuristic framework that locates bureaucratic change along three relational dimensions—bureaucracy-society, bureaucracy-politics, and internal governance—and four opposing pairs of transformation, offering analytical tools to assess the democratic anchorage, resilience, and reform potential of public administration under conditions of polarization.