Barbara Piotrowska, a Researcher on the History of UK Public Spending Control 1993–2015 project at the Blavatnik School, has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. The fellowship gives early career researchers an opportunity to undertake a significant piece of publishable work.

Barbara's project is entitled 'Bureaucracy in the transition to democracy: testing a theoretical assumption'. A major political science theory argues that during a democratic transition, attitudes of public sector workers carry over from the autocratic state and threaten the functioning of the new democratic regime. This creates an argument for overhauling bureaucratic personnel during a democratic transition. Barbara's project tests empirically if this threat is real. Its three phases will study the differential attitudes of bureaucrats vis-a-vis the general population in democracies and autocracies worldwide.