Conference Agenda

Orientation: Linear causal theories are often criticised for being impractical in addressing complex political-administrative relationships. The technical or simple cause-and-effect analysis appears inept in dealing with the contemporary complexity of the political-administrative dichotomy in coalition politics. Competing values and frameworks often characterise the latter, which is susceptible to negotiated democratic outcomes. In other words, competing political and administrative values can no longer be addressed by dichotomous, binary or even engineering approaches.

Research purpose: This study argues that in the contemporary epoch, universalism or absolute knowledge inspired by Hegelian scholars such as Woodrow Wilson’s “Administrative State” and Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History and the Last Man” seminal texts are no longer feasible for addressing contemporary coalition political problems that affect not only the form and shape of the political-administrative dichotomy but also the enduring nature of liberal democracies in the 21st century.

Motivation for the study: Like the United States, South Africa “borrowed” extensively from Western Europe in constructing its constitutional democratic framework that shape its political-administrative interface.

Methodology: This study used an interpretive research paradigm and qualitative approach to explore the political-administrative interface in coalition-led governments across developed and developing countries. Eighteen coalition government and political-administrative dichotomy experts in Public Administration, Political Science and Constitutionalism were selected, with nine from developed and nine from developing countries. Qualitative data analysis software (DEDOOS) was used to code the data, revealing themes and subthemes.

Main finding: Similarly to Western Europe, the dominant party system in South Africa appears to have reached its limits, at least in most metropolitan municipalities and the national government. Subsequently, this led to political instability that have dire consequences not only for policy preferences and strategies but also for democratic accountability and sustainability. Thus, what to borrow and leave is central to creating an effective iterative integrative coalition negotiation framework for accountable political-administrative interface in coalition-led governments.

The emergence of populist regimes and their authoritarian tendencies, including the destruction of democratic institutions, which scholars have variously described as democratic backsliding, democratic erosion, deformation of democracy, or democratic regression, has led scholars to scramble to find ways to save democracy. Alarmingly, the diminishing of democracy is of an insidious and subtle nature, driven by antiliberal populist politics, which reject basic democratic principles, such as constitutional checks, the separation of powers, or the protection of human rights.

Scholars continue to express serious concerns about this kind of democratic erosion and have proposed solutions to reverse this trend. Scholarly enquiries into the issue have led to the understanding that one major way of dealing with the problem is to have a professional, effective, and efficient bureaucratic system with the capacity for good policy development and effective and efficient public service delivery.

Against this backdrop, democratic backsliding may be addressed through “bureaucratic resilience,” Thus, for these scholars, bureaucratic resilience, including strengthening the administrative state to meet the numerous challenges, is the remedy to prevent democratic backsliding to ensure that the public bureaucracy performs its mandates, especially in the area of service delivery.

The relevance of the discussion about the role of public administration applies to both developed and developing countries, but more so to developing ones in which bureaucratic resilience promises to prevent democratic backsliding, including coup d’état. This development is vital since developing countries have been experiencing significant democratic backsliding as compared to many developed countries. The potential of investigating bureaucratic resilience as a bulwark against democratic backsliding in developing countries is possibly based on the idiosyncratic and contested nature of democracy in developing contexts.

Yet in many developing countries, the public administration system is extremely weak, as compared to the developed world, and thus making it difficult for it to serve as the bulwark against democratic dismantling in these countries. In view of this, we are of the view that these countries do not need a resilient public administration system, simply because resilient public administration is important where the public administration is well established to address the needs of the society. Consequently, the question this paper intends to address is: Do developing countries need a resilient or a robust public administration system to enhance democratic sustainability? The burden of this paper is to make a case for the existence of a robust bureaucracy that is more forward-looking and proactive than bureaucratic resilience, in developing countries, to deal with democratic backsliding and democratic sustainability using Ghana as a case study. Ghana merits attention due to its democratic credentials in Africa. In this way, the paper contributes to how to build a robust public administration system that other developing countries can learn from. The paper is based on documentary analysis, which is the analysis of documents that contain information about the phenomenon, or a systematic procedure for reviewing or evaluating documents, both printed and electronic (computer-based and Internet-transmitted) material.

We consider how the year 2020 offered two historically “critical,” and interrelated string of events relating to the public health and election administration crisis that placed significant stresses on democratic institutions and civil servants led to the prolonged erosion of democratic accountability standards in the United States (US). These events were both examples of, and contributors to, democratic backsliding (Bermeo, 2016; Bauer and Becker, 2020; Bauer et al, 2021) as evidenced by the transgressions of some of the core accountability standards of liberal democracies, including eroding trust in democratic institutions and career civil servants.

As those who have studied the history of liberal democracies have noted (Mann, 1970; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2020), liberal democracies have emerged and been sustained through the establishment of democratic institutions that balance the powers of the state and the society. Democracies have been said to exist in the “narrow corridor” within which state power and authority is checked by society, specifically citizens, civil society, and industry, and in turn these state’s provide protection of individual rights, personal liberty, and the overall general welfare of society (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2020). If there is one thing that the history of democratic societies tells us, liberal democratic states are fragile. They can be knocked out of the narrow corridor.

This manuscript begins by laying out a set of standards that may be used to provide benchmarks or a basic set of criteria for determining if a liberal, democratic state may be said to exist. We then provide a detailed description of critical event analysis (Sewell, 1996; Garvia-Montoya and Mahoney, 2023) and its application in the assessment of historical critical events. This review will include describing links to critical juncture theory (Capoccia, 2015), and culminate in the description of the diagnostic methods to be employed in the study. We then provide a basic description of the relatively stable state of public health services and elections administration prior to 2020, and then provide a timeline of major milestones that marked both events between March of 2020 and January of 2021. Applying the benchmarked criteria found in democratic accountability standards (Koliba, 2025) we then critically examine how the selected events of 2020 are evidence of democratic backsliding as defined as transgressions of liberal democratic accountability standards, with a specific focus on how these events coupled to erode accountability standards relating to truth claims, professional discretion, and institutional forbearance. We conclude with some consideration of the lasting impacts of these events on the well-being of US democracy, drawing attention to actions of the first 100 days of the Trump Administration. Implications for comparative analysis regarding democratic backsliding in European states. This manuscript will address the TAD focusing question relating to: “How to support and reaffirm democratic values within public administrations.”