Policy
Policy making outputs
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
How does perceived bureaucratic performance shape democratic legitimacy? Drawing on the 2024 EQI survey of 135,000+ respondents in 210 EU regions, we study the link between evaluations of local administration (quality, impartiality, corruption) and two outcomes: vote intention for populist parties and abstention, using multi level logit models. Across all specifications, higher perceived quality of government is associated with lower support for populist parties. At the same time, improvements in perceived quality are linked to a modest rise in abstention. The findings underscore the importance of high quality subnational governance for democratic attitudes and behaviour but also point to a trade-off: improving administration quality may lower demand for anti systemic/populist parties but can also slightly depress participation. However, to the degree that this small reduction in turnout also implies decreasing demand for populist or anti-establishment options this is not necessarily a finding that is concerning from a democratic legitimacy perspective.
Visualisation
The RADAR Innovation Dashboard presents key insights from a new dataset of public sector innovations developed by the Hertie School as part of a work package for the RADAR project. The dataset covers 1,710 cases across 42 countries, over two decades, and across various government levels. Cases are drawn from several sources, such as best-practice datasets and public sector awards. The dashboard displays key information about the individual cases, including country, policy field, year of creation and level of government, and is available to the public via the RADAR website.
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Policy making highlights
The RADAR project had a successful kick-off event from 17-19 February 2025.
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What we do
The RADAR project combines
- rigorous research and analysis from top public administration research departments with
- the teaching and training infrastructures of (national) Schools of Government that will function as knowledge brokers
to bring science to policy through high-level conferences and to train public officials to foster innovation and reform while deepening democratic governance.