The scale of the conceptual problem is striking. A search of the ERIC database found that more than 200 academic papers published in the last decade used the term ‘politicization’ in their title or abstract, yet with striking inconsistency. Some authors use it to describe campus climate, others as a synonym for state pressure, and still others to describe the politicization of individual identity. Many define the term not at all. The result, the authors argue, is analytical promiscuity that reduces an important phenomenon to a buzzword, leaving scholars without a shared vocabulary to detect when and how governance actually changes. Their remedy is to import rigor from political science and sociology, delineating four distinct approaches to politicization, each with its own ontology, causal mechanism, and set of empirical indicators.

The first approach, associated with political scientist Michael Zürn, defines politicization as the demand for or act of transporting an issue into the field of politics, making previously unpolitical matters political. Here, the key indicator is a shift in jurisdiction: a dispute once handled by departmental committees or professional norms migrates into parliamentary hearings and binding policy settlements. The second approach, advanced by the Sheffield School of British institutionalism, treats politicization and depoliticization as instruments of statecraft. Depoliticization, in this account, is not a retreat of politics but a governing strategy that delegates contentious issues to arm’s-length agencies, expert bodies, or market mechanisms in ways that reduce visible executive responsibility. Politicization is the reverse: a reassertion of political control into venues where elected officials can steer outcomes. The Sheffield School operationalizes this through three tactics: institutional, rule-based, and preference-shaping depoliticization or repoliticization.

The third and fourth approaches emerge from discourse theory. The constructivist view, associated with Jacques Lagroye, holds that no issue is inherently political; politicization is a social process of relabeling, in which actors successfully strip an activity of its perceived neutral or professional status and rebrand it as political. A curricular decision, such as the design of a gender studies syllabus, becomes ‘political indoctrination’ rather than academic judgment. The post-foundational approach, drawing on Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, goes further, distinguishing between ‘politics’ as routine administration and ‘the political’ as the ineradicable dimension of antagonism that such ordering attempts to contain. Politicization, in this framework, is the disruptive moment, a strike, blockade, or governance crisis, that exposes suppressed conflict beneath an apparent academic quiet.

To demonstrate how one of these frameworks works in practice, the researchers applied the Sheffield School approach to Israel, a country whose higher education system was historically characterized by strong arm’s-length autonomy yet now faces persistent allegations of state encroachment. The historical arc is essential to the analysis. Israel’s universities, founded on Humboldtian ideals of academic freedom before the state existed, clashed after 1948 with a nation-building ethos that viewed higher education as a strategic instrument. The friction produced the 1958 Council for Higher Education Law, which created an independent statutory body dominated by academics and public figures, an early form of institutional depoliticization. In 1974, the Planning and Budgeting Committee, modeled on the UK’s University Grants Committee, moved the power of the purse to an autonomous academic-led subcommittee, further insulating the sector from political control.

The pendulum then swung the other way. From the early 1970s, surging demand for access among marginalized populations overwhelmed the elitist status quo, and state authorities intervened more directly, culminating in a 1995 amendment that granted college degrees equal status to university degrees. Institutions nearly tripled, and cohort participation reached roughly 50 percent by 2010. A secondary wave of depoliticization followed, as the Ministry of Finance’s Budget Division defined the macro-parameters and budgetary rules for the Planning and Budgeting Committee, bypassing both the Cabinet and the Knesset and cementing a technocratic governance model. This era, the authors stress, did not signal a retreat of the state but a reconfiguration of control, with fiscal rules prioritizing market logic over traditional social or academic mandates.

The empirical core of the study covers 2010 to 2025 and rests on three methods: 22 semi-structured elite interviews with former ministers, members of Knesset, and regulatory and university leaders; deductive analysis of higher education legislation; and descriptive statistics tracking the composition of the Council for Higher Education and the Planning and Budgeting Committee. The legislative record reveals a clear escalation. Amendment 18 prohibited state scholarships for students evading military conscription, passing with a broad bipartisan majority. Proposed Amendment 19, based on the recommendations of the professional Messer-Yaron Committee, would have consolidated governance under a unified statutory Higher Education Authority, but it died in cabinet after the 2015 elections. Interviewees described the moment in vivid terms. One recalled a minister objecting that the reforms would have prevented the establishment of Ariel University, while a senior council official described a minister telling the prime minister that the plan meant losing all control over higher education, and at that moment, it died.

Subsequent legislative moves intensified the trend. The 2018 Amendment 20 applied Israeli sovereignty to academic institutions in the occupied Palestinian territories, cementing the controversial upgrade of Ariel University and signaling the subordination of the council’s professional guidance to the political establishment. Proposed Amendment 22 went further, compelling institutions to dismiss employees suspected of supporting terrorism under threat of budgetary sanctions, shifting adjudication responsibility from the police to the academy and targeting institutions for refusing to penalize lawful academic speech. Meanwhile, amendments to the 2007 Student Rights Law, originally a consumer-protection statute that explicitly avoided academic content, began to intrude into credit allocation and speech regulation. A 2018 law mandating academic credit for state-sanctioned volunteering effectively nationalized the university’s currency, stripping senates of their authority to define academic value, and it passed with broad bipartisan support.

The statistical evidence is perhaps the most dramatic finding. University representation on the Council for Higher Education collapsed from a majority of 67 percent in the ninth council to a minority of 29 percent in the fourteenth. The share of the elite ‘Old 4’ research universities, responsible for some 70 percent of national research output, was cut nearly in half, from 37 to 19 percent, and their representation on the Planning and Budgeting Committee dropped to zero by 2023. Concurrently, the college sector surged from 7 to 39 percent. The researchers trace this transformation to a deliberate strategy of ‘membership engineering’ that began around 2001, when Education Minister Limor Livnat launched a campaign titled ‘Ending the Cartel,’ framing universities as a detached, self-serving liberal elite. The rhetorical tactic of labeling universities a ‘cartel’ legitimized the dilution of their representation, a textbook case of preference-shaping that weakened the institutional barrier of depoliticization. Interviewees noted that the statutory duty to consult universities carried no teeth, amounting to symbolic consultation in which ministers could consult and then decide otherwise.

The study’s conclusions carry weight well beyond Israel. First, student rights legislation can be weaponized as an attack surface on institutional autonomy, with the language of public good and access morphing into an individualized, rights-based discourse that masks state intervention. Second, politicization often involves the targeted delegitimization of intermediary bodies rather than their formal abolition. Third, and perhaps most counterintuitively, politicization is not an exclusively partisan practice: several controversial bills enjoyed bipartisan support, and once depoliticization norms are breached, the appetite for executive control appears to transcend the left-right divide. Fourth, the transition from professional autonomy to political contingency is cumulative, and once politicization practices are institutionalized, they appear difficult to reverse regardless of which party holds power. For democracies facing neo-nationalist pressures, from the United States to Hungary to Brazil, Israel serves as a diagnostic warning that politicization is a tangible threat resulting from deliberate administrative strategy, not merely inflammatory speech. The researchers also note that universities are not passive: the Association of University Heads has mounted legal challenges and lobbied against legislative overreach, and external metrics now classify Israel as a ‘newly registered decliner’ on the Academic Freedom Index. By converting a vague catch-all into a systematic research program with observable mechanisms, the study offers scholars and policymakers a blueprint for detecting, and perhaps resisting, the quiet machinery of political control over the academy.

Subject of Research: Politicization and governance of higher education systems

Article Title: Beyond the buzz: analyzing (re)politicization in higher education

Article References: Fraenkel, Y., & Bamberger, A. (2026). Beyond the buzz: analyzing (re)politicization in higher education. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01787-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01787-y

Keywords: higher education, politicization, governance, academic freedom, Israel, Sheffield School, depoliticization, neo-nationalism, populism, student rights, university autonomy, public policy

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