The RADAR project
The RADAR project (Renewing Administration through Democratic Anchorage Reforms) aims to enhance the democratic governance of public services and public administrations. To construct legitimacy for public administration, it will focus on democratic anchorage, new narratives and education.
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Latest highlights
The RADAR project had a successful kick-off event from 17-19 February 2025.
Members of the RADAR consortium came together at the European University Institute in Florence in November 2025. It seems only fitting that we met in the Hannah Arendt Room.
No results found.
Latest project reports
Conceptual paper
This note develops the concept of democratic anchorage as an analytical lens for assessing how administrative reforms contribute to the legitimacy of public governance. It expects that reforms are democratically anchored when they are designed and implemented in liberal-pluralist formats, i.e., participatory in design, inclusive and transparent in execution, and normatively aligned with widely shared democratic values. Rather than treating legitimacy as an automatic by-product of technocratic performance, democratic anchorage analyzes empirically the role of participatory structures, procedural mechanisms, and narrative justifications that “hook and bind” administrative change to democratic norms and structures. The concept of democratic anchorage is thus advanced as both a normative benchmark and a testable empirical framework for evaluating the legitimacy of public governance through administrative reform.
Report
Public administration reforms (PARs) are frequently justified by the expectation that they will enhance citizens’ trust in government and strengthen the legitimacy of political and administrative institutions. Yet, despite decades of scholarly and policy attention, systematic,
comparative, and empirical evidence on the relationship between PARs and citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy remains limited. This paper presents a systematic literature review of empirical studies examining how administrative reforms influence legitimacy perceptions, following PRISMA reporting standards. The review synthesizes findings from diverse reform contexts to assess whether and under what conditions such reforms bolster political trust and perceived legitimacy. By mapping the scope, direction, and conditionality of observed effects, the study identifies key evidence gaps and conceptual ambiguities.
Report
This Report presents first cross-national outputs of RADAR’s WP 3, which analyses
how European public administrations articulate reform, resilience, and democratic
principles in their official documents. WP3 builds a hybrid, multilingual analytical
system that combines large-scale corpus construction with NLP structuring, LLMassisted
reasoning, and systematic human validation. The resulting CLIO Library now
includes nearly 500 national documents and over 10,000 EU texts, allowing for the
comparative study of Romania, Belgium, and a preliminary Dutch corpus.
No results found.
Partner organisations
Radboud University
the Netherlands
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Belgium
Tallinn University of Technology
Estonia
Direction Interministerielle de la Transformation Publique
France
University of Gothenburg
Sweden
European University Institute
Italy
National School of Political Science and Public Administration
Romania
Hertie School of Governance
Germany
European Association for Public Administration Education
Europe
Regional School of Public Administration
Western Balkans