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How to better coordinate policies and public services across public sector organizations has been a major topic of public administration research for decades. However, few attempts have been made to connect these concerns with the growing body of research on biases and blind spots in decision-making. This book makes that connection. It explores how day-to-day decision-making in public sector organizations is subject to different types of organizational attention biases that may lead to a variety of coordination problems in and between organizations, and sometimes also to major blunders and disasters. The contributions address those biases and their effects for various types of public organizations in different policy sectors and national contexts. In particular, it elaborates on blind spots, or 'not seeing the not seeing', and different forms of bureaucratic politics as theoretical explanations for seemingly irrational organizational behaviour. The book's theoretical tools and empirical insights address conditions for effective coordination and problem-solving by public bureaucracies using an organizational perspective. Tobias Bach is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway. Kai Wegrich is Professor of Public Administration and Public Policy at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany.--

Administrative reform policies cutting across several sectors are commonplace in the public sector. However, reform policies do not necessarily result in organizational change. This article examines intra-organizational change within the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture in a longitudinal case study covering a period of three decades, which allows us to study short-term and long term-effects of administrative reforms. Whereas existing research mainly uses single-factor explanations for inter- and intra-organizational change, this article emphasizes the interplay of various drivers of organizational change within government organizations. In analytical terms, we draw on the multiple streams framework to study intra-organizational decision-making which is embedded in government-wide administrative reform policies. We find that reform leads to intra-organizational change when a political entrepreneur is able to couple solutions and problems in a decision window, which may happen decades after the initial reform attempts, underscoring that short-term reform failure may turn into success in a long-term perspective.

AbstractThe article analyses the public attribution of blame and the use of presentational strategies of blame avoidance in complex delegation structures. We theorize and empirically demonstrate that complex delegation structures result in the diffusion of blame to multiple actors so that a clear allocation of responsibility becomes more difficult. The article shows that public attribution of blame follows a distinct temporal pattern in which politicians only gradually move into the centre of the blame storm. We also find that blame-takers deploy sequential patterns of presentational management and use blame shifting to other actors as a dominant strategy. However, the analysis suggests that complex delegation structures impose limitations on blame-takers' use of blame avoidance strategies, and that sequential presentational management becomes less useful over time. The article uses media content analysis to study blame games during a major crisis of the public transport system in Berlin, Germany.

Transnational networks of national agencies became almost ubiquitous in the European Union (EU) during the last two decades. However, the literature focuses almost exclusively on the functioning and impact of these networks on EU policy making. This article examines these networks from the hitherto neglected perspective of national agencies. Thereby it contributes to two important research questions: On the one hand, the article provides empirical evidence for the assumption of a clear increase of national agencies' involvement in European networks. On the other hand, the article provides a mapping of the involvement of four key German regulatory agencies in EU administrative networks. In doing so we show that there are typical patterns of network building and that different types of networks often persist side by side. Adapted from the source document.

The environment of national agencies has changed considerably in recent years as they increasingly become engaged in European Union networks. This article contributes to a growing body of literature on those networks and their effect on executive politics at the national level by asking whether and how the EU involvement of national agencies affects the agencies' autonomy in policy formulation. We develop an analytical model for explaining the effect of EU involvement on agency autonomy. Analyzing data from a comprehensive survey of federal agencies in Germany, we find that EU involvement has a positive effect on national agencies' policy autonomy. Moreover, we find a somewhat stronger effect of agency involvement in sectoral networks on autonomy than in intergovernmental networks, which is attributed to information asymmetries between ministries and agencies. Yet this effect is weaker than initially expected, which can be explained by a considerable degree of overlap between different types of EU involvement.

Wie können Wissenschaftsbehörden, die in den hierarchischen Staatsaufbau integriert sind, nach außen glaubwürdig darstellen, dass sie trotz ihrer Nähe zur Politik neutral bleiben und ihre Beratungsaufgabe allein nach wissenschaftlichen Kriterien erledigen? Im Fall der Ressortforschungseinrichtungen des Bundes scheint dies kein Problem darzustellen, da deren wissenschaftliche Glaubwürdigkeit genau damit begründet wird, dass sie Teil der Exekutive sind. Der Aufsatz nimmt dies zum Ausgangspunkt, um auf Grundlage der Unterscheidung zwischen den idealtypischen Akteurmodellen des Agenten und des Treuhänders die Rolle der Ressortforschung zu untersuchen. Zu diesem Zweck werden ein rechtsstaatlich-juristischer, ein wissenschaftspolitischer und sektorspezifische Expertendiskurse unterschieden. Es wird gezeigt, dass eine variierende Rollenzuweisung der Ressortforschung als Agent oder Treuhänder dazu beiträgt, konfligierende Wahrnehmungen und Zielvorstellungen zu harmonisieren. Dies wird dadurch ermöglicht, dass Ressortforschungseinrichtungen verschiedene Aufgaben gleichzeitig erfüllen, so dass sie sowohl als Agent wie auch als Treuhänder wahrgenommen werden können. Die schlichte Unterscheidung zwischen Agent und Treuhänder erweist sich damit bei multifunktionalen Organisationen als differenzierungsbedürftig. ; How can research agencies which are integrated into the hierarchical state apparatus provide credible expertise for policy-decisions? In the case of governmental research agencies (GRAs) in Germany, this does not seem to pose a major problem, as their scientific credibility is taken for granted precisely because they belong to the Federal Government. The article addresses this puzzle by drawing on insights from the literature on delegation relationships which distinguishes between agents and trustees as ideal types of delegates. These ideal types are used to analyze three dominating discourses regarding GRAs: a legal discourse, a science policy discourse, and sectoral expert discourses. We show that each discourse is characterized by different and often conflicting assumptions regarding the importance of scientific freedom and the legitimacy of hierarchical interventions. The paper suggests that GRAs may simultaneously be agents and trustees under the condition of heterogeneous tasks. The simple distinction between agent and trustee thus becomes problematic for analyzing multi-purpose organizations.