Restoring the Deformed Administrative State? Bureaucratic Repair After Illiberal Rule

ABSTRACT While scholarship has documented how populist and authoritarian‐leaning executives deform bureaucratic institutions, post‐illiberal reconstruction has only begun to receive attention. This paper develops an exploratory framework distinguishing four repair strategies (neutralizing, rectifying, balancing, and democratic hardening) and two repair modes (formal‐institutional and normative‐capacity repair). Applying the heuristic to Poland, Brazil, and Hungary, we posit that the selection and limits of repair strategies follow the gap between the depth of illiberal entrenchment and the legal‐political capacity of successor governments to overcome veto players and enact rectifying reforms. Within the periods observed, formal‐institutional repair has outpaced the reconstruction of professional norms, expertise, and trust, and repair has produced layered administrative orders in which illiberal‐era instruments partly persist and thus remain available to future governments. Administrative repair is thus structurally asymmetric. Democratic successors can rebuild the administrative state, but they are unlikely to restore it to the status quo ante.