The illiberal transformation of government bureaucracies: Patterns and dynamics

Emerging experience on the illiberal transformation of central government bureaucracy suggests that it is not a one-way street leading to a new equilibrium. The paper examines this dynamic and links it to existing scholarship on organizational change and administration. Firstly, we develop an improved descriptive-analytical frameworks grasping that transformation. Secondly, we examine a case of illiberal transformation, Hungary, to explore the patterns of underlying dynamics and compare them with expectations derived from theories of organizational change in bureaucracies. Based on depth interviews with key informants the paper identifies temporal patterns such as consecutive waves, reversals and delayed responses.