Populism challenges our democracies. And populists in governments attempt to transform public administration systems in manifold illiberal ways. This chapter outlines an analytical frame for systematic comparative research on determining how populists attempt to convert public bureaucracies, what are their motivations, and what are their chances of succeeding.  It bridges different strands of scholarship that have remained rather insulated so far. It complements the debate on system transformation and democracy systematically with administrative aspects. The chapter thus offers a path to integrate public administration scholarship in system transformation research by eliciting the role of bureaucracies in reform projects of populist governments.

The complex relationship between populist governments and their bureaucratic apparatus constituted the center of the theoretical and empirical analyses of this book. The concluding chapter synthesises the comparative insights form the chapters and assesses the validity of the theoretical claims of the introduction. It warns that populists in government are not condemned to fail. Populism may well get entrenched in individual political systems. Public administration has a warden role: namely, identifying threats to liberal society and our democratic systems.

This chapter comprises the following sections: names, taxonomy, subspecies and distribution, descriptive notes, habitat, movements and home range, activity patterns, feeding ecology, reproduction and growth, behavior, parasites and diseases, status in the wild, and status in captivity.

The book

Over the past decades, governments in most developed countries have for a variety of reasons reformed the ways in which public policy is designed and delivered (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004; Levi-Faur, 2012). Although the trajectories of change diverge across countries and over time, one recurring element is that many governments have systematically, although generally not programmatically, shifted executive powers and responsibilities away from the congested political-administrative centres of the state toward a host of third parties: nonprofit organisations, privatised state enterprises, networks, transnational and international organisations, semi-autonomous agencies and local governments. This strategy has enabled governments to increase their points of contact with societal actors and stakeholders and to develop networks for service delivery and governance (Peters and Pierre, 1998; Torfing and Sorensen, 2014). It has also meant that more actors – and different kinds of actors – now bear at least some responsibility for public policies. This endows them with a strategic interest in the news media as an arena where their interests can be served and where the credit for success and the blame for failures are distributed (Schillemans, 2012; Hood, 2002).

Alongside these developments in democratic governance, the media sector has undergone at least as significant changes as governance. The 24-hour news cycle, the rise of social media, and a more competitive and more vulnerable economy of news production and delivery have changed the landscape of journalism (Krause, 2011; Djerf-Pierre, 2000). In addition, the practice of journalism has increasingly emphasised critical scrutiny and the imposition of a mediatised format on politics (Mazzoleni and Schulz, 1999; Esser and Stromback, 2014). Meanwhile, the need – or the perceived need – to spin political messages and the ability to manage the blame game has added a new dimension to governing. On the one hand, the role of classical journalistic media has come under pressure, with the rise of social media, the furore surrounding fake news and direct challenges by populist politicians. On the other hand, however, the new social media reality offers opportunities for the traditional media, for instance as new sources of information (Brands et al, 2018) or for the verification of the credibility of sources (Fletcher et al, 2017).

Social media and local government

The advent of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs provide government institutions with both challenges and opportunities (Klang and Nolin, 2011; Magro, 2012). On the one hand there is potential to increasing legitimacy through involvement, collaboration and dialogue (Knox, 2013). Social media allows citizens to communicate directly with government institutions and government actors may respond directly to the public. However, there are also difficulties with accommodating large flows of direct public feedback into public organisations (Knox, 2013).

What is more important is that social media may alter the power relations between conventional media institutions (press, radio and television) and government actors, that is, transforming the very trajectory of mediatisation itself (for example, Schulz, 2004; Miller, 2014). Social media provide the political elite with opportunities to circumvent the filtering and gatekeeping practices of professional news organisations and communicate directly with citizens. This poses a challenge to the power of conventional media and the dominant news media logic; that of professional journalism in press, radio and television.

To date, most studies on how government actors relate to social media have focused on national elections and politics (for example, Schweitzer, 2011; Southern, 2014) while local government has received less attention (Larsson, 2013). The key issues to explore in this context are thus if social media have similar implications for local governance as studies suggest they have at the national level, and to what extent the advent of social media has changed the ways in which local politicians and bureaucrats relate to the news media, particularly the local press. Our main research questions are thus how local political and administrative elites relate to the media, and to what extent social media complement or replace conventional news media in local governments’ public communication.

This chapter first examines the development of local governmentmedia relations across time, on the basis of a unique survey-based data set comparing the local political and administrative leadership's media strategies in 1989 and 2010. We surveyed the local senior political and administrative leadership in all municipalities in Sweden, including the Chairman of the Executive Board (CEB) who is the top elected politician and de facto mayor of the city; the city manager (the top, non-elected, public servant and the Head of the city administration); and the financial manager (the senior economic manager in the city administration).