Bureaucracy in transition to democracy

Should bureaucratic personnel be overhauled after an autocratic government collapses? For 34% of the world’s population currently governed by an autocratic regime, this is a very real question. History shows us that getting the answer wrong can be very costly: the removal of officials from the Ba’ath Party in the new Iraqi political system was one of the main reasons for the insurgency that spread in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s removal from power in 2003.

So far, the dominant theoretical approach to this question has assumed that autocratic bureaucrats hold attitudes and beliefs that are incompatible with democracy, and has argued for their removal after an autocratic breakdown. The aim of this Leverhulme Trust funded project is to empirically test this theoretical assumption. Specifically, I study whether, if correct, the assumption applies to different types of bureaucrats and public sector workers (from “street” to managerial level), and whether the individuals that enter the bureaucratic pool during the democratic transition are significantly different from the “old guard”.

Working Papers

1. Piotrowska, B. M. (2024). The effect of political alignment on street-level bureaucrat job satisfaction and motivation. Governance, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12853 

2. (with Monika Nalepa) "Clean sweep or picking out the `bad apples': the logic of secret police purges with evidence from Post-Communist Poland" Revise &Resubmit at the American Journal of Political Science.

3. "Street-Level Bureaucracy and Democratic Backsliding. Evidence from Poland" Revise and Resubmit at Governance

4.  (with Izabela Szkurłat and Magdalena Szydłowska) Regime transitions and institutional weakness. The case of police reform in Poland in the early 1990s. Chapter in Street-Level Bureaucracy in Weak State Institutions: The Everyday Experience of the State from a Global Perspective eds Rik Peeters, Gabriela Lotta & Fernando Nieto-Morales (Forthcoming in 2024)

5.  (with Izabela Szkurłat and Magdalena Szydłowska) "Research designed. How populist governments affect the direction of academic research"

Other

Contribution to a panel on "Bureaucratic Resistance to Global Autocratic Ambitions" organized by the Center for Effective Government (University of Chicago): link (my contribution: min 30)