The acceptance of the political primacy of elected civilians over the armed forces is a republican achievement, and democracies suffering from interference of armed forces into civilian government are usually understood to be at risk. This paper analyzes a particular mode of illiberal transformation of democracies from within, namely what can be conceived of as the stealthy militarization of the civilian bureaucracy and the capture of the state by the armed forces. The proposition is that such militarization of the bureaucracy “through the backdoor” constitutes a specific case of democratic backsliding that is increasingly occurring in different countries around the world. The paper provides a theoretical derivation of such a modus of democratic backsliding, suggests indicators to observe it, and illustrates its occurrence in the real world with data taken from Brazil under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. We analyze quantitative data about the presence of military members in the civil organizations over time and qualitative data from interviews with civil servants that have worked under the command of military members who occupied positions in civil organizations. The data show how military members infiltrated the civil service, how they increased their power over time and which mechanisms they introduced to change the management culture in the civil service, creating a new type of nondemocratic governance. The analysis contributes thus to the debate about the perils of populists in government and autocratization trajectories by identifying a particular type democratic backsliding, namely the militarization of public administration, to which especially young democracies with a history of military rule appear vulnerable to.

The COVID 19 pandemics have sparked unprecedented and unpredictable political responses and interventions dramatically affecting societies, markets and the lives of individuals. The ensuing political interventions, which took place under great uncertainty and turbulent conditions, could challenge the robustness of key ideas underpinning liberal democracies. Based on the Danish and the Swedish cases, we analyze and compare the ways in which the political interventions seeking to curb the spread of the Corona virus have affected the ideational robustness of the political regimes in terms of the constitutional order, parliamentary dynamics, and the public support for or resistance. It is argued that Denmark and Sweden handled the pandemic in quite different ways and that both countries saw important challenges to liberal democracy. Still, the institutional and not least the ideational foundation of liberal democracy seemed to prove fairly robust in both countries.

Turbulence and crises have become a constant for public administrations, as governments struggle to adapt to modern conditions of policy-making and service provision. Within the unpredictable context, the pressure towards the public sector to provide an adequate response has increased. Academic literature on crisis governance has provided fragmented responses with normative and often competing forms highlighted – from decentralized, participatory and trust-based arenas to centralized, closed, command-oriented decision-making. Whilst in mono-paradigmatic perspectives they have been reflected as conflicting, the perspective of hybridity provides insight on the convergence and mutual reinforcement. This paper presents an integrative literature review, focusing on key features and instruments of the ideal types in governance (hierarchical; network-based; market), democracy (representative; deliberative; direct) and law (prescriptive; framework; reflexive) in a crisis context. The paper relies on key articles in hybridity, meta-governance, democracy and legal literature complemented with insights from the crisis management literature. The findings highlight, how advantages and disadvantages of ideal types are addressed in configurations through mixing and matching with other ideal types and other ideal type typologies. With the toolset available in differing contexts, the mixing and matching can adhere to different types of configurations – scenario-based ex ante instruments; ad hoc top-down; ad hoc bottom-up.