Suchergebnisse

This article starts by discussing 'agencification' and fragmentation in national governments. When dealing with the problems that these developments might cause for democratic control and agency accountability, one only tends to look at the relationships between agencies and various national stakeholders, in particular ministerial departments. Has a 'methodological nationalism' hindered us from seeing the emerging executive centre at the level above, i.e. the European Commission, and the re-coupling of nationally decoupled agencies into a multilevel Union administration? The development of the EU, due to its peculiar institutional architecture, takes quite another direction than intergovernmental cooperation and comes to challenge governments in an unprecedented way. National agencies become parts of two administrations-a national as well as a Union administration. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract.  An organisational approach to European integration focuses on individual actors' organisational context in order to account for their behaviour, interests and identities. Intergovernmentalists usually preclude any profound impact of European Union (EU) institutions and organisations. Institutionalists (other than rational‐choice institutionalists), on the other hand, claim that EU institutions are able to shape and reshape individual actors' preferences and sense of belonging. Seen from an organisational perspective, however, institutionalists often fail to specify (and theorise) the organisational components that institutions may contain. This 'unpacking' of institutions is necessary in order to clarify the conditions under which transformation of actors and policy processes might occur. This article tries to illustrate what an organisational approach has to offer in fields like committee governance and Commission decision making. In addition, organisational theory provides a yardstick for assessing the degree of overall system integration.