In looking at the complex relationship between expertise and power in policymaking, what is amiss are studies on how the expertise exchange bargain between politicians and bureaucracy works in practice, especially in antidemocratic contexts. To deal with this limitation, we use Christensen’s (Christensen, J. (2022). When bureaucratic expertise comes under attack. Public Administration) expertise bargain change model for examining the authority transaction between politicians and bureaucrats. Upon external shocks, such as democratic backsliding with the sidelining of policy advice, the extant expertise bargain is challenged. We explore how the bureaucracy acted toward the government’s adversarial (and even antagonistic) stance and how that relationship toward the expertise bargain changed in two policy areas in Brazil (health and environment) during Bolsonaro’s administration (2019–2022). Notably, this article relies mainly on qualitative data from in-depth interviews with bureaucrats who provided expertise to the government on these policy areas during the Bolsonaro administration’s transition. Ancillary documentary sources were examined to detail the strategies of attack from government toward bureaucratic expertise and ancillary documentary sources of quantitative data from a survey with bureaucrats fielded during the Bolsonaro administration’s first year. Results show three factors that condition bureaucratic expertise’s resilience: the nature of the attack (local or extensive), the knowledge base’s and epistemic community’s level of cohesion, and the advice system’s degree of institutionalization. This case study sheds light on how different policy advice arrangements respond and function under antidemocratic contexts, allowing the application and enrichment of policy expertise literature outside regular democratic politics.

中文翻译：

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当讨价还价是可能或不可能时：民主倒退背景下的官僚专业知识政治

在审视政策制定中的专业知识和权力之间的复杂关系时，我们缺少的是对政治家和官僚机构之间​​的专业知识交换交易如何在实践中发挥作用的研究，特别是在反民主的背景下。为了解决这一局限性，我们使用克里斯滕森（Christensen，J.（2022）。当官僚专业知识受到攻击时。公共管理）专业知识讨价还价变化模型来检验政客和官僚之间的权力交易。一旦发生外部冲击，例如民主倒退、政策建议被边缘化，现有的专业知识交易就会受到挑战。我们探讨了在博尔索纳罗执政期间（2019-2022 年），官僚机构如何应对政府的对抗（甚至敌对）立场，以及在巴西的两个政策领域（健康和环境）中，与专业知识讨价还价的关系如何发生变化。值得注意的是，本文主要依赖于对博尔索纳罗政府过渡期间在这些政策领域向政府提供专业知识的官僚进行深入访谈的定性数据。检查了辅助文献来源，详细说明了政府对官僚专业知识的攻击策略，以及博尔索纳罗政府第一年对官僚进行的调查的定量数据的辅助文献来源。结果显示了影响官僚专业知识弹性的三个因素：攻击的性质（局部或广泛）、知识库和认知社区的凝聚力水平以及建议系统的制度化程度。本案例研究揭示了不同的政策建议安排如何在反民主背景下做出反应和发挥作用，从而允许在常规民主政治之外应用和丰富政策专业文献。