RADAR - Renewing administration through democratic anchorage reforms

The RADAR project (Renewing Administration through Democratic Anchorage Reforms) aims to enhance the democratic governance of public services and public administrations. To construct legitimacy for public administration, it will focus on democratic anchorage, new narratives and education. RADAR’s first objective is to improve the understanding of the relationship between public administration reforms and democratic legitimacy. This will be achieved through a scoping review; multi-level statistical analysis of data from the European Quality of Government Index; a systematic analysis of emerging innovative solutions using a newly created database of innovation cases; and a comprehensive analysis of reform discourses. RADAR’s second objective is to examine under which conditions efforts to improve the democratic legitimacy of public administration reforms are effective. Using a combination of research methods including experiments, focus groups, and case studies, it will examine three types of initiatives that have shown the most promise: participation/co-creation, representative bureaucracy and experimental governance. The third objective is to translate the findings from RADAR’s research into concrete methods to increase the input and output legitimacy of public administration, allowing reforms and innovations to achieve results while respecting and strengthening democratic institutions. RADAR’s final objective is to make methods to democratically anchor reforms and innovations part of the education and training received by current and future civil servants and policymakers. With seven leading research institutes, two national schools of government, a Ministry at the core of public innovation, and an international NGO, the RADAR consortium represents a wealth of research and teaching experience. The partners are European leaders and innovators in their area of expertise, and have the ability to cover all 27 EU countries as well as the Western Balkans.