Unforging Bureaucratic Autonomy
Friday, September 4, 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA | Register here
In-person | Full Paper Panel
Participants:
- (Chair) Daniel P. Carpenter, Harvard University
- (Discussant) Rachel Augustine Potter, University of Virginia
- (Discussant) Stephen E. Hanson, College of William and Mary
Session Description:
In an era of democratic backsliding, understanding how bureaucratic autonomy is undone is as urgent as understanding how it is forged. Across democracies, elected leaders increasingly target administrative agencies as institutional constraints on executive power, sometimes incrementally and sometimes through rapid, decisive interventions that quickly reorder authority. Yet autonomy does not unravel uniformly: some agencies resist political interference through legal protections, professional norms, and alliances, while others—including agencies long regarded as paradigmatic cases of autonomy—prove strikingly vulnerable. This panel explores the concept of unforging autonomy to analyze how bureaucratic independence is politically dismantled. Building on classic work on the forging of autonomy (e.g., Carpenter 2001) and insights from the literature on institutional change and policy resilience, the papers challenge assumptions about the durability and self-reinforcing nature of autonomous institutions and policies. The panel asks when, why, and how autonomy is unforged (and when and why bureaucracies are able to resist) emphasizing both cross-national variation across political systems and within-country variation across agencies operating under the same executive. Together, the papers examine the role of trust in government agencies, deeper political-institutional drivers of autonomy’s decline, and the implications of bureaucratic subordination for institutional legitimacy and democratic resilience.
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