“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”: Understanding politicization in the populist era

Abstract

Our conventional understanding of politicization highlights a variety of strategies used by the political leadership to increase its control of the public service. The recent emergence of populist and/or autocratic regimes in advanced democracies has exacerbated these tendencies. However, we lack a framework that allows us to capture opposition within the public service to the tightening grip of autocratic leaders of the public servants or the policies they expect public servants to implement. The article outlines such a framework by highlighting top-down as well as bottom-up politicization. The framework furthermore differentiates between proactive politicization on the one hand, and strategies to delay or obstruct the execution of political programs on the other. Based on these distinctions, the article outlines a typology of politicization that captures these so far ignored tensions between the political leadership and public servants.

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