The study, a critical integrative literature review published on 1 October 2026, tackles a blind spot that has long divided two research traditions. Organizational behavior scholarship has treated performance largely as a technical and organizational outcome, detached from employees’ social realities. Meanwhile, research on work-family conflict has documented psychological consequences such as stress, burnout, and job satisfaction, but rarely fed those insights back into performance theory itself. The result, the author argues, is a fragmented understanding of how gendered experiences shape organizational effectiveness. The review synthesizes literature on women’s family-career conflict, organizational context, and employee performance, focusing on the South African public sector as an institutional setting where these tensions are particularly acute.

Role Theory provides the study’s theoretical spine. The theory holds that individuals occupy multiple social roles, each carrying its own expectations, norms, and responsibilities. The work role demands productivity, efficiency, and accountability; the family role demands caregiving, emotional labor, and presence. Conflict arises when these expectations are incompatible. But the author contends that Role Theory has typically been applied too narrowly, used descriptively to explain stress and emotional strain rather than to interrogate what role conflict means for organizational outcomes. Crucially, the study argues that role conflict does not automatically reduce performance. Instead, it shapes how performance is enacted, and the direction of that effect depends on the environment in which employees operate.

This distinction matters because the empirical evidence is messier than linear models suggest. While many studies associate higher work-family conflict with lower job performance, reduced engagement, and emotional exhaustion, others report weak, inconsistent, or statistically insignificant relationships. Some women maintain satisfactory performance despite considerable family-career conflict, developing adaptive coping strategies that alter how conflict is translated into workplace behavior. The review also highlights the multidimensional nature of performance: an employee may meet formal targets while quietly withdrawing discretionary behaviors such as collaboration, innovation, or organizational citizenship. Narrow measurement, the study suggests, may itself contribute to the inconsistent findings scattered across the literature.

The South African context is not treated as mere backdrop but as a structuring force in its own right. The public service carries apartheid legacies, labor inequality, bureaucratic fragmentation, gendered organizational norms, and uneven state capacity. On paper, the state promotes transformation, inclusion, and employment equity; in practice, hierarchical authority structures, rigid procedures, and historically embedded power relations persist. Recent South African scholarship shows that gender inequality endures across leadership access, promotion systems, and workplace culture despite constitutional and legislative commitments to equality, and that discrimination often operates through subtle micro-inequities and informal exclusion rather than overt discrimination alone.

Layered onto these institutional conditions is an unequal distribution of domestic labor. Women continue to carry a disproportionate share of unpaid caregiving, household work, and emotional labor despite increased participation in formal employment. Female public sector employees therefore operate within dual systems of accountability: bureaucratic organizational expectations on one side, socially embedded caregiving obligations on the other. Existing performance systems rarely account for this imbalance, and instead reproduce what feminist HRM scholars call the ideal worker assumption, the expectation that productive employees remain continuously available, temporally flexible, and minimally constrained by family responsibilities. Because work demands are formalized and time-bounded while family demands are open-ended and socially enforced, the conflict women experience is not simply more intense; it is structurally different, more continuous, and less visible within formal organizational systems.

The review also situates its argument within contemporary Human Resource Management debates. Modern HRM scholarship increasingly acknowledges that employees experience work differently depending on gender, social position, and access to organizational support, yet dominant performance frameworks still evaluate workers through universalized assumptions of availability and uninterrupted productivity. Sustainable HRM advocates preserving employee wellbeing and long-term employability, but often stops short of reconceptualizing performance itself. Emerging concerns about algorithmic management intensify the problem: AI-driven evaluation systems that privilege measurable visibility and quantifiable outputs risk reinforcing inequalities by penalizing employees whose caregiving responsibilities constrain their temporal flexibility.

From this synthesis, the study proposes a framework titled Performance as a Context-Based and Socially Embedded Process, built on three interrelated layers. The input layer consists of gendered role expectations, the socially constructed allocation of professional, family, and domestic responsibilities that generate women’s family-career conflict and unequal access to behavioral, emotional, and cognitive resources. The structuring layer positions organizational context, including leadership practices, HRM systems, bureaucratic procedures, and workplace flexibility, as the institutional environment that enables or constrains behavioral capacity, rather than as a mere moderating variable. The output layer reconceptualizes performance itself as a dynamic process emerging from the interaction between social roles and organizational conditions. This architecture explains why employees with similar levels of conflict may show different performance outcomes across settings: their environments provide different opportunities, resources, and constraints.

The author is careful to specify boundary conditions. Organizational context is not the sole determinant of performance; studies show that some employees sustain high performance despite substantial conflict and limited support, aided by resilience, professional commitment, and occupational identity. The framework was developed primarily for the South African public sector, where bureaucratic rigidity and limited flexibility are prominent, and may transfer less cleanly to flatter organizations, occupations with high schedule discretion, or national contexts with different gender norms. The framework itself remains untested empirically, and the review, while transparent, was not exhaustive. These limitations, the study notes, define the agenda for future research rather than undermining the contribution.

The implications reach beyond theory. If performance is a contextually negotiated capacity rather than a fixed individual output, then performance management systems built on the ideal worker norm are not merely unfair; they are conceptually incomplete, rewarding behavioral visibility over equally distributed effort. The study argues that sustainable performance depends on sustainable behavioral conditions, and that employees cannot continuously deliver high performance where access to time, emotional resources, and flexibility remains unequally distributed. For public-sector reform, the message is pointed: context-sensitive performance systems are not a soft accommodation but a precondition for accurate measurement. Employees, the study concludes, do not perform in isolation from their social realities. They perform within institutional environments that either constrain or enable their capacity to negotiate competing role demands, and understanding performance requires understanding the conditions under which performance becomes possible at all.

Subject of Research: The role of gendered family-career conflict and bureaucratic organizational context in shaping employee performance in the South African public sector

Article Title: Reconceptualizing employee performance in bureaucratic systems: a context-based analysis of gendered role conflict in the South African public sector

Article References: Madingwaneng, M. J. (2026). Reconceptualizing employee performance in bureaucratic systems: a context-based analysis of gendered role conflict in the South African public sector. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 4, Article 1916691. https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1916691

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1916691

Keywords: employee performance, work-family conflict, gender inequality, Role Theory, South African public sector, human resource management, bureaucracy, organizational support, performance management, sustainable HRM, women's careers, organizational psychology

The research team, led by Jessie Mulcaire with Ciarán O’Driscoll, Leah Holt, Sana Zard, and Francesca Brady, used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, a qualitative methodology designed to explore in depth how individuals make sense of their lived experience. Unlike large-scale surveys, IPA privileges the richness of first-person accounts: researchers recruit a small, purposively sampled group and analyse each transcript in detail before identifying patterns that cut across cases. Here, seven adults were recruited through non-governmental organisations working with migrants and refugees. The sample was deliberately diverse — participants differed in why they had become stateless, in their countries of origin, and in their current immigration status in the UK — which strengthens the claim that the themes identified reflect the shared structure of statelessness itself rather than the circumstances of any single national or legal group.

From the analysis, four group experiential themes emerged, and together they sketch a pathway from administrative entrapment to psychological injury. The first, and in many ways the organising theme of the whole study, was titled Trapped in a Kafkaesque System. Participants described immigration and asylum bureaucracies as draconian, discriminatory, and self-perpetuating: processes that generated endless waiting, contradictory demands, and circular decision-making in which resolving one problem seemed to create another. Crucially, the researchers characterise these structures as stripping away three fundamental resources — autonomy, security, and time. A person who cannot work, cannot plan, and cannot predict when a decision will arrive loses not only material support but the capacity to author the direction of their own life.

The second theme, Erosion of Self and Belonging, describes what prolonged administrative limbo does to identity. Participants reported feeling reduced to a case number, a file, a non-person — an administrative object rather than a social being. The researchers identified what they call dual legal and relational abandonment: stateless people are simultaneously abandoned by states, which refuse to recognise them, and by the relational worlds — families, communities, professional identities — that prolonged displacement and legal uncertainty sever. Belonging, in this account, is not a vague emotional comfort but a structural condition underwritten by legal recognition. When recognition collapses, the connections that sustain a coherent sense of self begin to fray with it.

The third theme, Psychological and Embodied Harm, is where the study makes its most striking claims. Participants reported anxiety, depression, suicidality, post-traumatic stress disorder, and somatic symptoms — physical manifestations of distress such as those affecting the body under chronic stress. The researchers are explicit that these harms were located unambiguously within structural conditions: they were not framed by participants as pre-existing vulnerabilities but as consequences of the system itself. In one of the most sobering data points, two participants reported that UK immigration procedures damaged their mental health more severely than prior experiences of incarceration. That comparison — between the deliberate deprivation of liberty by a criminal justice system and the ostensibly administrative handling of people seeking recognition — is likely to fuel ongoing debate about the psychological design of immigration processes.

The analysis also reached across generations. Participants identified intergenerational effects of statelessness, describing how the instability, exclusion, and distress of parents ripple into the lives and development of children. This finding aligns with a broader body of research on how chronic parental stress and social exclusion shape child outcomes, but it adds a distinctive mechanism: here the stressor is not poverty or violence alone but the state’s refusal to confer legal personhood, a condition that can persist for years and transmit its uncertainty to the next generation. The authors suggest this makes statelessness not merely an individual mental health issue but a potential vector of long-term population-level harm.

Yet the study is not without hope. The fourth theme, Survival Strategies and Systemic Limits, documents what participants did to endure. Community networks, religious faith, political activism, and well-equipped, understanding services all played protective roles, offering meaning, connection, and practical support where the state offered none. But the researchers are careful to frame these resources as bounded. Resilience, they argue, cannot substitute for rights. A community group can cushion the blow of exclusion; it cannot restore the right to work, to healthcare, or to a legal identity. Framing stateless people as resilient, the study implies, risks romanticising coping that is forced upon people by structures that should never have produced the need for it.

From this pathway — Kafkaesque systems produce entrapment, entrapment erodes identity and belonging, and erosion generates psychological and embodied harm only partially mediated by coping — the authors draw concrete implications. On the policy side, they call for reduced waiting times in immigration decisions, restored and adequate Legal Aid funding so that people can navigate legal processes without representation gaps, and the right to work and healthcare access during protracted legal processes rather than after their resolution. Each of these targets a specific mechanism identified in the themes: waiting attacks time, unaffordable legal help attacks autonomy, and work and healthcare bans attack security and belonging. The policy recommendations are thus not generic humanitarian appeals but direct responses to the psychological architecture of the system as participants described it.

For clinicians and services, the implications are equally specific. The authors argue for clinician training on statelessness and for services that recognise statelessness-related distress as legitimate clinical territory, rather than deflecting responsibility to immigration authorities. In practice, mental health professionals encountering stateless patients often face a dilemma: the distress in front of them is driven by an administrative situation they cannot resolve, and services may be tempted to treat the underlying problem as outside their remit. The study pushes against that reflex, arguing that the psychological harm produced by structural exclusion is real, diagnosable, and treatable in its own right, even while its ultimate remedy lies in policy. Recognising this, the authors suggest, would prevent the double abandonment participants described — abandoned by the state, and then by the services meant to help them cope with that abandonment.

The study’s limitations are those inherent to its design: seven participants, recruited through NGOs, in a single national context, analysed with a method that prioritises depth over statistical generalisability. IPA makes no claim that its themes describe all stateless people; rather, it offers a rigorous, theoretically grounded account of how this form of exclusion is experienced by those who lived it. But as statelessness grows as a global concern — driven by state succession, discriminatory nationality laws, conflict, and the stripping of citizenship — the psychological evidence base remains thin, and studies of this kind provide the conceptual groundwork that larger quantitative and intervention research will need. What the seven voices in this study make unmistakably clear is that statelessness is not a paperwork problem with psychological side effects. It is, in the researchers’ framing, a system that manufactures mental illness — and the most effective intervention, they conclude, is to change the system itself.

Subject of Research: Lived experiences of statelessness and its mental health impacts among stateless migrants in the UK

Article Title: Kafkaesque systems: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of lived experiences of stateless migrants within the UK

Article References: Mulcaire, J., O’Driscoll, C., Holt, L., Zard, S., & Brady, F. (2026). Kafkaesque systems: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of lived experiences of stateless migrants within the UK. PLOS Mental Health, 3(10), e0000756. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000756

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000756

Keywords: statelessness, mental health, migrants, United Kingdom, interpretative phenomenological analysis, immigration policy, bureaucracy, trauma, anxiety, depression, human rights, qualitative research

The authors draw on their experience delivering multiple studies funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research and government bodies, in which they have served as chief investigators, co-investigators and delivery researchers across qualitative and mixed-methods projects on NHS workforce behaviour, organizational culture and collaboration between healthcare providers. They are careful to frame the piece as a reflective commentary rather than a systematic audit: the patterns they describe have not been quantified nationally, but they emerge repeatedly from the lived experience of running organizationally sensitive research inside the health service. The focus is on England’s NHS, although the underlying architecture, including the Integrated Research Application System known as IRAS and approval by the Health Research Authority, operates UK-wide, meaning many of the same risks apply in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The core problem, the authors argue, is a mismatch of design. Existing governance treats the participant as a patient, the site as a treatment facility, and transparency as a safety mechanism. That logic makes sense for a drug trial, where a local principal investigator needs to know which patients are enrolled so they can respond to adverse events. It makes far less sense for a survey of staff experiences of unprofessional behaviour, where the organization itself is the subject of scrutiny rather than merely a gateway to patients. Yet many NHS research and development departments still apply the most stringent clinical interpretation of the rules to workforce studies, requiring named local principal investigators, senior leadership sign-off and detailed site documentation that can reveal exactly who is being studied, where, and why.

The mechanisms of exposure are varied and often invisible to ethics committees. Distributing a full local information pack to every participating site exposes all included sites to each other. Research passports issued to external researchers list every organization involved. The NIHR Research Delivery Network portfolio, which exists to track study progress and is often a prerequisite for sites to access infrastructure and funding, can make participating sites identifiable through the Open Data Platform and other publicly visible systems. Even where a research team has scrupulously protected confidentiality in its own communications, the act of portfolio registration itself can broadcast an organization’s involvement to any interested party, including potentially its own leadership and staff.

The consequences for data quality are direct. Participant information sheets routinely assure staff that their organization will not be identifiable in publications, and research ethics committees approve those assurances in good faith. But where sites require senior leadership sign-off before a study can be set up locally, people within the host organization may learn that the study is happening, what it is investigating, who the local principal investigator is, and which categories of staff are being recruited. If staff suspect their employer is aware of a study on bullying or patient safety, the rational response is to self-censor in interviews or surveys. Research demanding a high degree of psychological safety, or posing reputational risk to organizations, is particularly vulnerable, because these are precisely the topics on which employees moderate their answers when they feel under institutional surveillance. The result can be under-reporting and guarded accounts that obscure the very behaviours researchers are trying to understand.

The burden of the system is also measurable. A recent survey of 252 health services researchers found governance processes widely perceived as disproportionate, inflexible and ill-suited to non-interventional and qualitative work. In a striking audit, Petrova and Barclay found that a single low-risk NHS study required 89 individuals to approve it and generated 491 exchanges outside formal systems such as IRAS. Some NHS trusts decline workforce studies altogether, citing capacity problems in their research and development units. For an under-pressure R&D department, a low-risk interview study about sensitive organizational issues may demand many of the same local processes as clinical research while offering little treatment innovation, minimal recruitment numbers, no local funding and potential reputational discomfort, creating a structural disincentive to take part.

Change, however, is underway. From March 2026, the Health Research Authority introduced a new governance pathway for studies involving NHS and social care staff as participants. It streamlines site set-up, limits the visibility of participating sites within IRAS, reduces the need for local site authorization in many cases, allows chief investigators to act across sites without local principal investigators, and clarifies that research passports are not required for studies conducted remotely. The reforms were not designed explicitly around confidentiality, but the authors argue they may partially mitigate the risks while cutting administrative burden. A replacement for IRAS, called the Plan and Manage Health and Care Research system and hosted on gov.uk, is also being piloted, though early experience suggests site R&D departments will need training to process study modifications under the new platform.

The commentary goes further, setting out six prioritized recommendations. These include a dedicated Health Research Authority pathway for sensitive organizational research; removing or reducing local principal investigator requirements in low-risk staff studies in favour of a minimal site contact with no access to participant identities; binding national guidance limiting local re-review of matters already assessed centrally, with an escalation route where it is ignored; pseudonymized, restricted-access or delayed-disclosure options for portfolio and Open Data Platform listings so sites can access funding without public exposure; waiving local sign-off entirely for low-risk, staff-only studies already approved nationally; and co-designing future reforms with researchers and R&D departments, with confidentiality protection treated as an explicit evaluation criterion alongside administrative burden.

The authors are careful not to swing the pendulum too far. Site visibility serves legitimate functions, from evidencing that a study has an authorized host to allowing funders to monitor public resources and providing a route for urgent safety escalation. Their proposals would preserve these functions through secure central records, role-based access, audit trails and named site contacts, while limiting disclosure to what is genuinely necessary. Waiving local sign-off would apply only to clearly defined low-risk studies with no patient intervention or clinical contact, and portfolio pseudonymization would retain auditable mapping for authorized oversight bodies. Accountability, they stress, need not depend on revealing participant identities.

The stakes extend well beyond research logistics. Sensitive workforce studies underpin efforts to tackle bullying, unprofessional behaviour and patient safety failures across the NHS, and they depend on honest accounts from staff who fear reprisal. If governance processes designed for clinical trials continue to undermine the confidentiality those studies promise, the result will be delayed research, declining participation and self-censored data, all at a cost to publicly funded science and ultimately to patients. The authors conclude that meaningful progress has begun, but that fundamental tensions between transparency, oversight and confidentiality will only be resolved through governance explicitly designed for organizational research, co-designed with the people and departments who must deliver it, rather than adapted once again from the world of clinical trials.

Subject of Research: Confidentiality risks in NHS research governance for healthcare workforce studies

Article Title: Research governance in England needs improvements to ensure participant and site confidentiality in healthcare workforce research

Article References: Aunger, J., Ferguson, J., Karaagac, E. A., Spence, T., Maben, J., Patnaik, A., Mannion, R., Zhao, Y., Proudlove, N., Bodenham-Chilton, H., & Walshe, K. (2026). Research governance in England needs improvements to ensure participant and site confidentiality in healthcare workforce research. Health Research Policy and Systems, 24(1), Article 81. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-026-01538-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12961-026-01538-6

Keywords: NHS, research governance, confidentiality, Health Research Authority, IRAS, workforce research, research ethics, health policy, qualitative research, bureaucracy, patient safety, NIHR

The distinction the authors draw between AI and earlier waves of digital government is technical as well as institutional. Previous generations of e-government technology primarily improved the efficiency, connectivity, and accessibility of administrative processes, digitising forms and speeding up workflows while leaving the underlying logic of human decision-making intact. AI, by contrast, increasingly performs the knowledge work of administration: it predicts, classifies, optimises, and generates scenario analyses that feed directly into judgements about rights, resources, and sanctions. The central analytical question, the review argues, is therefore no longer how governments digitalise administrative processes, but how administrative intelligence is governed and distributed across human and computational actors. In the authors’ framing, AI is best understood not as a discrete application but as a systems phenomenon whose consequences ripple across power structures, public values, institutions, decision-making, organisations, and frontline bureaucracy.

That systems perspective, drawing on the tradition of systems thinking associated with Barry Richmond and Donella Meadows, rejects the idea that AI’s effects can be assessed by examining any single agency or decision point in isolation. An algorithm deployed in one part of government depends on professional norms, institutional rules, data infrastructures, and frontline judgements that translate algorithmic outputs into real-world action. To capture these interdependencies, the editorial proposes a six-dimension framework covering the full administrative life cycle of AI. The framework moves from the strategic conditions under which governments acquire AI capacity, through the public values used to justify adoption, the institutions that authorise its use, the decisions officials make with it, and the organisations that implement it, to the street-level encounters where algorithms meet citizens. Each dimension, the authors insist, is a location where AI enters, circulates, and becomes institutionalised in government.

The first dimension, power structures, may be the most politically charged. The review argues that public administration scholarship has too often examined AI only after it arrives inside government, ignoring the political economy of the systems being procured. Governments frequently do not own the capabilities their AI depends on: digital infrastructure, specialist talent, computational resources, and research pipelines are concentrated in large technology firms. Drawing on scholarship on platform capitalism and technological sovereignty, the authors describe a fundamental asymmetry in technical capacity, epistemic authority, and regulatory knowledge between states and major tech companies. This dependence shapes what AI systems are available to governments, what officials can know about risk, bias, and explainability, and how much bargaining power agencies have when seeking access to proprietary source code or audit evidence. Supporting research in the special issue, using OpenAlex bibliometric data, finds that Big Tech’s presence in critical technology research is growing, particularly in AI, raising questions about who controls the knowledge on which public-sector AI increasingly rests.

Public value forms the second and normative core of the framework. The authors stress that in government, unlike the commercial sector, AI adoption cannot be justified by productivity or cost reduction alone; it must serve public purposes such as fairness, transparency, responsiveness, and trust. An algorithm that improves technical accuracy does not settle questions of proportionality or legitimacy, because public agencies must justify how decisions are reached and whose interests are served. A service that reduces processing time but increases exclusion or distrust cannot simply be counted as administrative improvement. Contributing papers in the collection develop this argument in detail: one proposes a value-chain approach for tracking where public value is created or lost across the stages of an AI-enabled service, while another maps 3,268 studies using BERTopic modelling and finds that after 2022, work on algorithmic fairness, ethics, and state-society relations has overtaken earlier emphases on efficiency and service delivery.

Institutions constitute the third dimension, translating public purposes into enforceable rules about who may use AI, under what conditions, and subject to which review. The editorial highlights a structural puzzle: most regulatory sandboxes were designed for private-sector innovation, where regulators supervise firms testing products, but in public-sector AI the state is simultaneously regulator, user, implementer, and accountable authority. One contributing paper adapts the sandbox model into an experimentalist governance framework for government AI, emphasising supervised testing, stakeholder participation, iterative learning, and institutional feedback. The authors connect this to Elinor Ostrom’s nested levels of institutional rules, showing how operational rules govern day-to-day AI use, collective-choice rules govern how those rules are revised, and constitutional-choice rules keep experimentation consistent with administrative law, procurement requirements, and rights protection. Institutions, in this account, do not merely permit or prohibit AI; they define the terms under which algorithmic systems can be tested, trusted, and treated as legitimate parts of public administration.

The framework’s fourth dimension turns to administrative decisions, where the editorial examines experimental evidence on whether public officials actually accept AI-assisted judgement, particularly in budgeting, a domain long understood as political rather than purely technical. The review contrasts two views of human-AI collaboration: augmentation, in which algorithms provide forecasts and rankings without displacing human responsibility, and de facto automation, in which officials defer to algorithmic outputs they lack the expertise or organisational backing to challenge. Extending Nathan Caplan’s two-communities theory, the authors suggest that technical experts, vendors, and data scientists may produce algorithmic knowledge that bureaucrats do not regard as usable or congruent with their problems, producing a decoupling between formal AI adoption and practical utilisation. Bureaucratic acceptance, they argue, is an overlooked condition for successful AI reform: officials must come to see algorithmic inputs as credible, legitimate, and compatible with the responsibilities attached to public office.

Organisations and street-level bureaucrats complete the framework. Implementation, the editorial stresses, is rarely smooth: public agencies inherit legacy systems, fragmented data arrangements, risk-averse cultures, and budget constraints, so AI reforms may look successful at launch yet lose momentum as maintenance costs rise and staff revert to familiar practices. Contributing research on AI-powered platform government shows that organisational inertia is not mere resistance but a mechanism through which prior investments and routines govern the pace and direction of AI use. At the frontline, drawing on Michael Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucracy, the authors argue that AI does not eliminate discretion but redistributes its materials, changing what officials see, how cases are categorised, and how departures from system recommendations must be justified. Ethnographic work in Finnish public organisations introduces the concept of the moral crumple zone: bureaucrats become accountability buffers who absorb blame for algorithmic failures while lacking meaningful control over the systems that shape their decisions. Experimental evidence from policing further finds that AI-supported enforcement can shift officers toward more formal, coercive styles, depending on the accountability mechanisms in place.

The editorial’s conclusion is stark in its ambition: AI represents a genuine paradigm shift rather than the latest phase of digital government, because it begins to change the nature of administration itself. If digital government changed the machinery of administration, the authors write, AI is displacing the human monopoly over administrative judgement. The review closes with a forward research agenda calling for scholarship to move from national AI policy to AI ecosystems, from AI ethics to AI legitimacy, from adoption to institutional capability, and from street-level discretion to behavioural adaptation. The decisive question for democratic governance, the authors argue, is no longer how governments digitalise administrative processes, but how they govern administrative systems in which computational actors increasingly participate alongside human ones, and whether citizens can still recognise, understand, and challenge the decisions that shape their lives.

Subject of Research: A systems framework for understanding how artificial intelligence enters, circulates, and becomes institutionalised across the public administration system.

Article Title: Artificial intelligence across the public administration system: public values, institutions, and bureaucrats in the algorithmic age

Article References: Cho, W., Fan, Z., & Zheng, Y. (2026). Artificial intelligence across the public administration system: public values, institutions, and bureaucrats in the algorithmic age. Global Public Policy and Governance, 6(2), 103-123. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00151-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00151-1

Keywords: artificial intelligence, public administration, public value, bureaucracy, street-level bureaucracy, algorithmic governance, technological sovereignty, regulatory sandboxes, digital government, administrative discretion, AI accountability, public sector innovation

The analytical core of the paper rests on distinguishing ordinary presidential leadership from hyperpresidentialism. In conventional accounts of separation-of-powers government, the president shares authority with an independent legislature and judiciary, and the bureaucracy retains at least residual professional autonomy. Hyperpresidentialism, by contrast, describes a configuration in which those countervailing institutions are weakened, bypassed, or subordinated, leaving the executive as the effective center of political life. Peters draws explicitly on earlier comparative work, including scholarship by Rose-Ackerman and colleagues on Argentina and the Philippines, where separation of powers formally persists but checks and balances function weakly in practice. The American case, he suggests, has moved toward that pattern.

One technical pillar of the argument concerns the politicization of the administrative state. Peters documents how successive administrations have expanded mechanisms for installing political loyalists throughout the bureaucracy, a strategy with an intellectual lineage running from Richard Nathan’s early work on the administrative presidency through contemporary comparative research on politicization in ministerial bureaucracies. In the current American context, this has involved the rapid movement of personnel through the Executive Office of the President, which the paper notes houses a large and shifting staff whose precise numbers fluctuate with the fluidity of assigned tasks. The effect, Peters argues, is to convert career civil servants from sources of independent expertise into instruments of executive will, hollowing out the neutral competence that once buffered policy from personal power.

The article does not treat personnel control as politically neutral administration. It catalogs appointments in which, in the author’s judgment, loyalty outweighed relevant expertise, citing the Secretary of Education, a former professional wrestling executive, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services as the most prominent examples. The paper also recalls the cautionary precedent of Michael Brown, appointed to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency despite a background promoting Arabian horses, whose agency failed spectacularly in responding to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Such cases, Peters argues, illustrate a structural hazard of hyperpresidentialism: when appointments become instruments of personal patronage, the technical capacity of government to manage complex crises degrades in measurable ways.

A second technical dimension involves the legislature. Peters analyzes how congressional control over public finance, long regarded as the cornerstone of legislative power, has eroded. He points to the fiftieth anniversary of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, the 1974 statute designed to restore congressional primacy over budgeting after presidential impoundments, and argues that the law’s machinery now faces what he describes as a mid-life crisis. Contemporary presidents, on this account, test the boundaries of impoundment authority and exploit procedural gridlock to shift fiscal initiative back to the White House. Combined with disciplined party pressure on legislators, exemplified by reporting on House Republicans’ eagerness to accommodate powerful figures in the administration’s orbit, Congress appears increasingly reactive rather than initiating.

The judiciary and the justice system form a third front. Peters notes reporting that an elite unit within the Department of Justice has experienced mass turnover even after the administration prevailed in Supreme Court litigation, suggesting that legal victory has not translated into institutional stability but rather into continued personnel churn and centralization of control. The doctrine of the unitary executive, which holds that all executive authority must be subject to presidential direction, receives extended comparative treatment, with scholarship situating the American version alongside global trends toward executive aggrandizement. Peters frames this doctrinal confidence as the legal architecture of hyperpresidentialism: each assertion of hierarchical control is defended as constitutional necessity, cumulatively converting a system of separated institutions into one of administrative command.

Communication strategy occupies a distinctive place in the analysis. The paper observes that President Trump created his own social media platform, Truth Social, explicitly to guarantee control of at least one direct channel to the public, a move Peters reads as emblematic of the hyperpresidential style. Earlier scholarship on authoritarian populism and the mass society, from Kornhauser onward, supplies theoretical context: personalized communication bypasses intermediating institutions such as parties and press, cultivating a direct affective bond between leader and mass audience. Peters links this to the broader personalization of politics documented across Anglo-American democracies, arguing that declining party membership and weakening institutional loyalty, trends visible since comparative party research in the early 2000s, create fertile ground for leaders who claim to embody the nation rather than represent a coalition.

Crucially, Peters insists that the United States is an intensified case of an international pattern rather than an isolated aberration. He surveys evidence of presidentialization in parliamentary democracies, where prime ministers have accumulated staff, media strategies, and personal mandates historically associated with presidents, citing new comparative work on the rising political craft of chiefs of staff in Westminster systems. The French Fifth Republic has even produced the label hyper-presidency in analyses of Nicolas Sarkozy’s activist style. Research on democratic backsliding and executive aggrandizement by scholars such as Bermeo and Laebens provides the conceptual vocabulary: hyperpresidentialism, in Peters’s framework, is the terminal stage of a continuum that begins with personalization and ends with the chief executive dominating political life even where formal democratic institutions survive.

The paper also situates the American trajectory in a longer historical arc. Peters traces precedents through the managerial and administrative presidencies of prior decades, the extraordinary assertions of executive authority under George W. Bush, and the systematic expansion of presidential power during the Cheney vice presidency, which recent reporting argues paved the way for the current administration to go further. International relations scholarship on neo-royalism connects the domestic consolidation of executive authority to an emerging global order in which personalist leadership is increasingly normalized. Against this backdrop, the second Trump administration appears not as a rupture with American tradition but as the culmination of cumulative institutional changes, with Project 2025 cited as a blueprint for reshaping the administrative apparatus along lines favorable to concentrated control.

The normative stakes are explicit. Peters argues that hyperpresidentialism threatens the epistemic and institutional foundations of democratic governance: politicized bureaucracies lose the capacity to speak truth to power, weakened legislatures cannot constrain fiscal or military action, and personalized communication dissolves the shared factual ground on which accountability depends. Recent scholarship on the guardian state, which asks how public services can be strengthened against backsliding, reflects growing concern among public administration researchers about these dynamics. Peters’s contribution is to name the endpoint clearly and to supply comparative evidence that it is reachable within an old constitutional democracy. Whether the United States remains an exceptional warning or becomes a template, the paper concludes, will depend on whether the countervailing institutions of the American system recover the capacity and will to check an executive that increasingly treats them as obstacles rather than partners.

Subject of Research: Hyperpresidentialism and the centralization of executive power in American government

Article Title: Increased centralization of power in American government: hyperpresidentialism

Article References: Peters, B. G. (2026). Increased centralization of power in American government: hyperpresidentialism. Global Public Policy and Governance. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00144-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00144-0

Keywords: hyperpresidentialism, executive power, American government, Trump administration, politicization, democratic backsliding, checks and balances, unitary executive, presidentialization, bureaucracy, Congress, personalization of politics