Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis review article, with a clear political science and public administration bias, takes stock of the existing literature on EU agencies and suggests a future research agenda. The article reviews studies on EU agencies' organization, tasks, proliferation and location in the political‐administrative space. Whether the advent of EU agencies tends to underpin a basically intergovernmental, transnational or supranational order has potentially huge consequences for the distribution of power across levels of government, for the degree of policy uniformity and pooling of administrative resources across countries, for the role of genuinely European perspectives in the policy process, and for accountability relations. Although the jury is still partly out on most topics, we see the contours of a more direct multilevel administration in which EU agencies not only constitute nodes within transnational agency networks, but in addition, in governance terms, relate more closely to the European Commission than to any other institution.

The European Union (EU) inherited 'indirect administration' from classical international organizations: policies adopted by the international organization are subsequently to be implemented nationally by member states themselves, and not by bodies owned by the international organization. This arrangement has often led to legislation being incorporated and applied rather differently across countries. In order to harmonize implementation practices within the EU, we have witnessed a development from 'indirect administration' to more 'direct administration' in the sense that national agencies work closely with the European Commission, EU agencies and sister agencies in other member states, partly bypassing national ministries. Thus, stronger coordination across levels may counteract strong coordination at the national level. This 'coordination dilemma' seems to have been largely ignored in the literatures on EU network governance and national 'joined‐up government', respectively. The ambition of this article is twofold: first, the coordination dilemma is theoretically and empirically illustrated by the seeming incompatibility between a more direct implementation structure in the multilevel EU administrative system and trends towards strengthening coordination and control within nation states. Second, the article discusses organizational arrangements that may enable systems to live with the coordination dilemma in practice.

AbstractThe cabinets of the European Commission are seen to play a crucial role in the policy‐making process. So far, however, they have in many respects remained 'black boxes'. In this article we 'unpack' the demographic composition in terms of nationality of three commissions' cabinets. The standard portrayal of cabinets has been that of national enclaves and points of access. Reforms during the period have required a more multinational composition. Our study shows that not only have the new rules been implemented: the new formal requirements have become over‐fulfilled and increasingly so. In 2004, 96 per cent of the cabinets contained more nationalities than formally prescribed and 57 per cent of the personnel were non‐compatriots of their respective commissioners. Based on studies of comparable phenomena, it is reason to believe that decomposition of a particular demographical cluster within an organizational unit reduces the impact of such demographical factors on officials' decision behaviour.

Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to reduce political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards to the robustness of these findings. In this article we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from executive politicians than their counterparts within ministerial (cabinet‐level) departments. This finding holds when we control for variation in tasks, the political salience of issue areas, and officials' rank. Simultaneously we observe that the three control variables all have an independent effect on officials' attentiveness to a steer from above. In addition we find that the more organizational capacity available within the respective ministerial departments, the more agency personnel tend to assign weight to signals from the political leadership. We apply large‐N questionnaire data at three points in time, spanning two decades and shifting administrative doctrines.

In terms of national agencies in the European administrative space, case studies indicate that national governments may be partly split so that national (regulatory) agencies operate in a 'double‐hatted' manner when practising EU legislation, serving both ministerial departmentsandthe European Commission. Applying large‐N questionnaire data, this article follows up these studies by investigating how important various institutions are with respect to influencing national agencies when they are practising EU legislation. How discretion is exercised at this stage of the policy process is not trivial; we demonstrate that, in addition, this activity is highly contested. Our main conclusion is that implementation of EU policies at the national level is neither solely indirect via national governments (as the standard portrayal says), nor solely direct (through Commission‐driven national agencies), nor solely networked (through transnational agency clusters). Implementation is instead compound with several sources of power represented more or less simultaneously.