This paper analyzes how politicization of policy issues affects street-level bureaucrats decisions and interactions with citizens. Drawing on the Brazilian context, where many policy issues have become highly politicized since the rise of the far-right government, we explore how street-level bureaucrats navigate this environment of politicization and policy polarization. Through analysis of existing studies and interviews with 25 street-level bureaucrats, including teachers, social workers, police officers and health workers, our research uncovers various consequences of politicization on street-level bureaucracy. These consequences encompass heightened tensions and conflicts between citizens and frontline workers, erosion of bureaucratic capacity, the emergence of non-compliant behaviors, and the perpetuation of inequalities in service provision. Furthermore, we investigate how factors such as professionalism, organizational support, and bureaucratic cohesion can either mitigate or exacerbate the effects of politicization on street-level work. This paper contributes to understanding how politics influences policy implementation and adds to the debate on political-administrative relations at the street level.

We conceptualize and illustrate the phenomenon that implementation resists political and media pressure and remains committed to the goals of the policy as decided. We label this phenomenon as “resilient implementation”. We argue that we can discern three conceptual pillars of resilient implementation: (1) organizational properties, (2) policy capacity, and (3) agency. We illustrate each strategy with a case from our empirical research in Switzerland: child and adult protection, social assistance, and medical cannabis administration. What ties the three pillars together is that they all address relationship between politics and administration. We therefore propose to understand resilient implementation as the successful management of the politics-administration dichotomy. We put forward future research trajectories along these conceptual lines in the conclusion.

“It takes a village to raise a child”. This classic pedagogical dictum points at the larger social context as important to the upbringing of our children and to the fact that we, as parents, are never the only ones influencing, shaping and raising our children. In this paper we study some of these authorities and a special aspect of this multifaceted civilizing process of children, namely the marking of social normality as educated, inclusive behaviour in pedagogical work. Pedagogical work addresses both abstract ideas about worthiness, social belonging, and inclusion in society as well as very concrete social practice of how to behave and ‘be’ with others to be seen and acknowledged as an equal, worthy member of society. Seen in this way kindergartens provide microcosms of the larger social context as places where pedagogues’ work to civilise children through educating them about how to navigate social boundaries between social normality and deviance. Also, public policy holds pedagogues accountable and responsible for compensating children and society for exclusion and deviance just as states see childcare as fundamental civilising institutions in the upbringing of future citizens. In other words: pedagogical work/childcare fulfils an important social role of creating social inclusion through a civilising childcare process. This paper explores to what extent professionalism matters beyond national contexts of law enforcement, culture and economic measures. The overarching question driving this research is whether pedagogical work can change the conditions of children even in despaired contexts or only maintain them? Put differently: does childcare play a progressive or a conservative role as it unfolds in kindergartens? Therefore, the case of childcare is explored as a contribution to the use of comparative analysis of frontline activity to enhance our general understanding of how institutions, ideas, and local practice impact public policy provision. The paper contributes empirically to how pedagogical ideas on child development are embedded in national contexts of policy implementation in situations where children push the boundaries of preferred behaviour. To accomplish this, the paper integrates an experimental logic into an interpretive interview study of pedagogues' ideas, reasoning, and preferred actions in childcare in diverse national (Brazil and Denmark) and local (rich/poor and equal/unequal) contexts providing empirics from very different national contexts with similar ideas on child development and pedagogical work. We analyse responses to three short scenarios of children on the edge of social inclusion to better understand how pedagogues interpret deviance in childcare and to explain preferred actions towards children. We present findings using a perspectival logic of comparing interpretations and point towards future research and theoretical implications for more extensive discussion of the theoretical and analytical SLB implications.

As exemplified by recent crises events, media reporting of local administrative action constitutes a critical mechanism for how citizens perceive the state. Recognizing the gap in quantitative analysis methods, this study employs a comprehensive machine learning framework to analyze a large corpus of media reports. Through natural language processing (NLP) techniques, we aim to develop a machine learning model that classifies positive and negative media reporting of administrative action at the level of paragraphs. We focus on the administrative action in the context of the Covid-19 crisis. We select three German newspapers and a sample of several hundred articles which we hand-code at the paragraph level (more than 5,000 paragraphs). We then train a deep learning-based language model that will be able to classify unseen newspaper articles. This approach aims at offering researchers a powerful tool for studying the dynamics of media influence on public perception over time, providing insights into how reporting on administrative actions evolves in response to crisis or other events.