ABSTRACT
Recent developments in also established democracies have made clear that public administration and management research alike have neglected giving scholarly attention to public organizations as institutions. Drawing upon research on leadership of institutions and leadership in public organizations we suggest a theory of public institutional leadership. Public institutional leadership reconnects public management with democracy by suggesting three central dimensions of leadership behaviors that instill and sustain liberal democratic values in public organizations. These behaviors include articulating and reaffirming democratic values through top-down vision-setting; building “character” bottom-up through role modeling and fostering psychological safety to enable dialogue and deliberation around these values as well as demonstrating constrained responsiveness to political principals relative to those values enabled by the cultivation of bureaucratic autonomy. Although the necessity of such behaviors is made salient by rising populism and democratic backsliding, their relevance extends to public management situated in liberal democracies in general.