Illiberal transformation of patronage bureaucracy under the populist radical right

Abstract

Abstract

This article examines how populist radical right government reshapes state bureaucracy within a patronage-based administrative system. While patronage and personnel politicization are common features of such systems across governments of different ideological orientations, we argue that populist radical right governments pursue a distinct pattern of bureaucratic control with implications for administrative backsliding. Drawing on longitudinal data on political and bureaucratic turnover across Slovak ministries between 2015 and 2025, we analyze two substantive areas of personnel management, purges and patronage appointments, and the treatment of institutionalized bureaucratic expertise, across temporal and spatial dimensions. The findings show that, compared with previous governments operating in the same patronage context, populist radical right governments sustain exceptionally high and prolonged levels of bureaucratic turnover beyond the initial post-electoral period, expand formal political appointments, and generate extreme levels of personnel replacement in ideologically salient policy areas. More broadly, the analysis suggests that administrative backsliding may unfold across diverse administrative contexts when populist radical right incumbents intensify and repurpose existing mechanisms of bureaucratic control, regardless of whether these originate in merit-based or patronage systems.