Democratic backsliding and public administration: the experience of the UK

Abstract

The extent to which the Brexit-era UK Conservative Party engaged in a style of politics identified as “populist” or “illiberal” has been much debated in recent years. This article argues that, during its period in government, it used power to roll back the frontiers of liberal democracy through deploying policy interventions drawn from an “illiberal playbook” encompassing the (legal in letter and spirit), “forging”, (legally dubious but admissible) “bending”, and (illegal and extra-legal) “breaking” of the institutions which undergird the rule of law (Pirro and Stanley 2022). The article uses a policy tools approach to categorize the relevant interventions, such as weakening Freedom of Information laws, placing onerous burdens on the rights to vote and protest, favouring political allies in procurement, and illegally shutting down parliament to avoid scrutiny. Situating these observations within recent developments in scholarship which draws linkages between public administration and democratic backsliding, it concludes by sounding the alarm as to the possible shape of things to come due to the flexibility and therefore vulnerability of the UK's constitutional system, the Conservatives’ authoritarian trajectory, and the rise of Reform UK.