Bureaucrats under Populism

We explore the consequences of populism for bureaucrats’ incentives by analyzing a model of delegated policymaking between politicians and bureaucrats. Populist politicians prefer a bureaucrat who implements their policy commitment, while non-populist politicians prefer a good bureaucrat with discretion. The presence of populist politicians thus determines replacement of good with bad bureaucrats and creates incentives for good bureaucrats to “feign loyalty”. We show that feigning loyalty is more prevalent when the probability of populist leadership in the future is higher and the bureaucrats’ pool of potential replacements is worse. We also show that bureaucratic turnover is higher under populists when the bureaucracy is strong and higher under non-populists when the bureaucracy is weak.