As Trump entered the White House, John Oliver offered a message of hope and reassurance to his liberal audience. Oliver pointed to examples of resistance among federal employees. He suggested public protests can empower and encourage such actions by bureaucrats: ”advocacy on the outside made advocacy on the inside possible”. His message reflects liberals’ hopes that professional civil servants could serve as a first line of defense against populist leaders’ undemocratic power grabs.
Such optimism is not irrational. Scholars who focus on democratic backsliding propose that bureaucracies might be equipped to act as “guardians” against authoritarian populists’ efforts to dismantle democracy. Authoritarians themselves also buy into the idea, using the mirage of bureaucratic resistance to justify politicization.
Yet recent studies cast doubts on the expectation of bureaucratic resistance. Career civil servants tend to perceive resistance as inappropriate and personally risky. Consequently, studies from Brazil under the Bolsonaro administration and Temer administration, and the first Trump administration show that liberal bureaucrats, facing pressure to promote illiberal policies, are reluctant to engage in “sabotage”. Instead, they distance themselves by keeping a low profile or exiting the civil service to resolve their identity conflict.
The hope that bureaucrats will resist illiberal policies and presidential grabs of power rests on a debatable premise. It assumes that civil servants, like liberals, perceive such policies and actions as threats to democracy and the rule of law. Our recent study, based on the Israeli experience, suggests this is not uniformly the case.
In January 2023, Israel's newly elected government coalition, dominated by populist and radical-right parties, launched what became known as the "judicial overhaul". Before these events, Israel’s democracy already had its flaws. Yet, the advancement of the judicial overhaul marked a new turn of democratic backsliding.
The plan, which the government branded as a “reform”, aimed to weaken the Supreme Court, curb judicial independence, and replace career-based professional legal advisors in government ministries with political appointees. The proposal sparked massive social protests and deepened the partisan cleavages between coalition supporters and the opposition.
A few very senior civil servants, like the government’s chief Legal Adviser and Attorney General, encouraged by the social protests, stood firm against the political executives. Some have since resigned, and others are still enduring constant intimidation by politicians. Still, our research suggests that one cannot generalize from these few salient cases of resistance to the civil service at large.
During the turbulence of February and March 2023, our research team surveyed hundreds of mid- and senior-level Israeli civil servants to understand how they viewed the government’s power grab and how they planned to respond. To avoid directly asking civil servants about the politically contentious judicial overhaul, we asked whether their family members and close friends perceived “the changes being advanced” as “malign or benign to Israel’s democracy.” We also used socio-demographic indicators as proxies for respondents’ partisan affiliation. To deepen our understanding, we collected qualitative data, including open-ended comments, interviews, and a focus group.
Our findings show that civil servants did not share a unified view of the “reform” as a threat to Israel’s democracy and its institutions - a perception we refer to as perceived democratic backsliding (see Figure 1 below). Much like the Israeli public, civil servants’ views diverged along party-bloc lines. While most of our interviewees expressed deep concerns about the judicial overhaul, we also found notable support, especially among those affiliated with the right-wing and religious coalition. We suspect these supporters may be under-represented in our sample, as some likely assumed the research is politically biased against the right-wing government.
We found that civil servants who supported the judicial overhaul typically reasoned that it would strengthen democracy by diversifying the judiciary and the bureaucracy, and allowing politicians to exert democratic control over policy. For example, an interviewee said:
I saw with my own eyes how the civil servants hamper the minister’s plans in every possible way—starting from legitimate persuasion through … tricks, misleads and leaks [to the press] … the minister has little power when facing the civil servants, which requires a change.
Others expressed ambivalence or suggested that the danger posed by the “reform” was exaggerated. These officials saw no reason to resist or exit the civil service.
In contrast, civil servants who viewed the judicial overhaul as a threat to democracy expressed an intention to leave the civil service or keep a low profile, mirroring patterns found among Brazilian and American civil servants.
In our survey data, civil servants with high perceived democratic backsliding scores (above the median) were 80% more likely to express a high intent to leave the civil service (36% versus 20%). Their inclination to exit stemmed from their belief that politicization of the civil service would increase and that their policy influence would be curbed. In interviews and open-ended comments, they expressed anxiety and a sense that their professional identity as guardians of the public interest was under threat. They were worried about being personally or collectively associated with carrying out the actions of a nondemocratic regime that could harm its citizens. The following responses reflect these concerns:
I dread this country's future and the ability of my children to live here in a world that reflects my values. I do not see how we can continue working in the civil service. It feels like I am taking part in something immoral that history will remember for many years.
I do not want to be part of a government that hurts the citizens.
If these laws [of the legal overhaul] pass, people would not stay and work…they will feel their opinion is undervalued and meaningless.
In other words, much like the general public, civil servants were divided along party blocs. Their social identities as citizens embedded in polarized political communities influenced their perceptions of the judicial overhaul. These perceptions, in turn, shaped whether or not they experienced a threat to their identity as civil servants, inducing opposition supporters to leave, and coalition supporters to remain in the civil service.
Based on follow-up surveys a year later, we found some of those who perceived the judicial overhaul as a threat to democracy had indeed left the civil service, and others actively sought to do so. These findings cohere with press reports on an unprecedentedly large wave of resignations among career civil servants across government departments.
These findings challenge the comforting assumption that bureaucracies can act as neutral guardians of democracy. In highly polarized societies, civil servants, like citizens, may be divided in their understanding of what constitutes a threat to democracy, depending on whether they support or oppose the governing coalition. Actions some civil servants view as dangerous power grabs are seen by their colleagues as legitimate efforts to improve governance. This means we cannot rely on the bureaucracy to unite and check authoritarian or illiberal leaders. The perceptions and responses of career civil service are shaped by the political divisions that run through society. And opposition does not necessarily translate into resistance. Instead, the potential guardians may exit, or choose to avoid conflict.
As countries around the globe confront rising populism and democratic backsliding, it is important to recognize that professional bureaucracies cannot solve what are primarily political problems. They may not always provide the safeguard many hope for, especially when civil servants are entangled in political and ideological divisions.
This post draws from the study: Alon Barkat, Saar, Sharon Gilad, Nir Kosti, and Ilana Shpaizman. 2025. "Career Civil Servants’ Socially Embedded Responses to Democratic Backsliding." Perspectives on Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759272500074X
Saar Alon-Barkat (s.alon.barkat@poli.haifa.ac.il) is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Haifa. His main academic research interest lies in the interrelations between modern government bureaucratic organizations and their external audiences, and their implications for democracy.
Sharon Gilad (sharon.gilad@mail.huji.ac.il) is a full professor in the Department of Political Science and the Federmann School of Public Policy and Governance at the Hebrew University. Her work centres on the ramifications of bureaucrats’ and citizens’ multiple social and political identities.
Nir Kosti (nir.kosti@lmu.de) is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow in the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. His research focuses on regulation, delegation of power, and regulatory discretion
Ilana Shpaizman (ilana.shpaizman@biu.ac.il) is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Studies, Bar-Ilan University. Her research focuses on the policy process, agenda setting, and the executive.
I'm not surprised by your research results as it falls in line with what I saw in many graduate classes. I'm a retired academic who taught graduate level courses, including ethics in the MBA program, and saw that too many students who were outraged with corporations that mistreated animals or the environment, or who ignored product safety regulations, or polluted the air or water, were just fine when large numbers of employees were laid off to increase the corporation's profits. Laid-off employees were only a cost; they weren't seen as individual humans. It wasn't until I added other factors to the discussion (inability to pay expenses, inability to pay for health insurance and food, etc.) and how these things not only impact the employee but they impact their family, their friends, their neighborhood, their city, their state, etc. I also saw students who were positive that employees who were asked to do things against their values and morals should immediately resign. Again, when I added additional points about the effects of suddenly losing your income, as mentioned previously, it was clear that sitting in a classroom and insisting on hardship by others was a shallow and limiting position. It's easy to say that civil servants should stand up and risk their jobs while we have no such decision to make. This is why we should insist on protections for civil servants if we want them to do this work for us.
We live in fascinating times.
Usually the fascists come in when economies are on their knees.
Our fascism arrived within an economy on top of the world, with the ability to print money at will.
"Everyone has a price."
I wish the above wasn't true but I've yet to see it proven false at any level of actual power.
It's all terribly depressing.