Why Populists Hollow Out Their States

Abstract: Current debates about democratic decline largely focus on the erosion of electoral, liberal, and other regime-level institutions. Yet executives today also pursue strategies that deliberately weaken the state itself. This essay brings the state back into the conversation by (re)introducing the concept of state erosion to capture processes through which elected leaders weaken the state's essential governance capacities by dismantling or politicizing bureaucracies, hollowing out regulatory agencies, centralizing coercive authority, or redirecting public resources in pursuit of partisan ends. Far from being confined to fragile democracies or partisan ideologies, we suggest that state erosion is proliferating across different global contexts. The stakes are profound: While state capacity is painstakingly built over generations, it can be quickly dismantled. The hollowing out of state capacity represents a pervasive threat to the survival of legitimate democratic governance.