Context Matters: Authoritarian Populism and Public Administration Practice, Teaching, and Research

• Author: Richard C. Box
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740221119254
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Context Matters: Authoritarian Populism

and Public Administration Practice,

Teaching, and Research

Richard C. Box

Abstract

The political context of public administration in the United States may change considerably in the near future, away from lib-

eral democracy and toward an intensif‌ication of the authoritarian populism familiar from the Trump era. The people and prac-

tices of public administration experience the effects of the societal context in their daily work and the course of their careers,

so that “context matters.”This essay uses the description of the current context of the public sector at the federal, state, and

local levels, and in academia, to examine the potential impacts of a contextual shift to authoritarian populism in the next sev-

eral years. The examination includes daily practice, the teaching of controversial concepts in public universities, and conduct-

ing research on salient topics in public administration.

Keywords

anti-government, authoritarian populism, context, politicization, regression

Introduction: Context and Consequences

The work of people in public administration at all levels of

government is shaped, directly or indirectly, by the political

context of the surrounding society. The use of government

to alter social or environmental conditions is a contested

concept in the United States, so periodically the growth of

government to solve perceived problems is countered by a

period of critique and contraction (Schlesinger, 1986).

Until recently, decades of neoliberalism made for a relatively

stable relationship between the public and private sectors, as

neoliberalism’s operational partner in government, New

Public Management, focused attention on economic eff‌i-

ciency and “running government like a business”(Box,

1999). Theoretical and technical concepts from this period

remain important in the f‌ield, but events over the past

several years have introduced a new level of turbulence

and uncertainty to the public sector.

The current narrative of danger to the American constitu-

tional order seems increasingly credible, as news articles,

opinion pieces, the U.S. House of Representatives January

6th select committee on the riot at the Capitol, investigative

reporting, and book-length treatments discuss the possible

end of the U.S. experiment in large-nation representative

democracy. A perceived sense of danger to democracy is

found in many other nations as well, though here we focus

on the United States, in which a party with a base of White

people and voters in rural areas uses cultural fear, voter

suppression, manipulation of elections, and threats of vio-

lence to secure political control as a minority of the

population.

This political context can be characterized as authoritarian

populism, a governing style intended to restore the

White-dominant social stability of the 1950s (or the 1920s

or 1890s, for that matter). It involves a specif‌ic form of

elite inf‌luence, renewed public receptivity to authoritarian

leadership, dissolution of facts into sometimes-bizarre

fantasies, a fading sense of public purpose, and increasing

anti-government sentiment. Policies and practices that have

accumulated over decades to address issues of public

concern are weakened or reversed, so this style of governance

may be characterized as regressive (Box, 2008, 2017). At the

time this essay was written, national politics were experienc-

ing a hiatus of sorts from the implementation of the authori-

tarian populist agenda, but this may well be temporary.

In this essay, a description of recent events in the public

sector is used to project potential effects on the practice

and study of public administration if authoritarian popu-

lism is more fully developed over the next several years,

especially following the presidential election of 2024.

University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA

Corresponding Author:

Richard C. Box, School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at

Omaha, 6001 Dodge St. Omaha, NE 68182, USA.

Email: boxrc3@gmail.com

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2022, Vol. 52(7) 475–485

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/02750740221119254

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