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Transformation Towards a new Public Administration of the Network UtilitiesDuring the 1980s and 1990s privatisation and deregulation movements have been shaken up the European network industries-telecommunication, electricity and railways. These reforms did affect also those parts of the public administrations in charge of managing and controlling the industries. While usually the changes in the relationship 'administration-market' have been the centre of academic attention, this paper attempts to investigate whether the very functions of the public administration themselves have been affected, i.e. altered or even transformed. Goes the emergence of the regulatory state hand in hand with the arrival of a new public administration? Comparing the examples of regulatory reform in the United Kingdom and Germany this paper attempts to provide a first answer.

This article analyses the 'partnership principle'—which is of particular importance for multilevel governance interpretations of European integration—as it evolved in EU regional policy-making. After sketching the crucial analytical lines of the current debate on 'partnership' on the example of the implementation of the EU structural policy in Germany, I examine how it functions. A closer look at two important sub-fields of 'partnership'—'societal participation' and 'policy evaluation'—reveals that theoretical expectations regarding its transforming potential, in terms of pitting supranational and subnational actors against central state authority and thereby cir-cumventing the latter, have not materialised. On the contrary, recently rising resentment and out and out conflict between the European Commission and regional authorities so far point to theoretically unexpected limitations of 'partnership', calling into question whether it is an appro-priate and sustainable inter-administrative co-ordination device—at least when viewed from the perspective of the multilevel governance thesis. In the light of the reported insights into the prac-tice of 'partnership', this 'new mode of EU governance' thus needs to be reassessed.

First published online: 19 September 2021 ; Whether and how bureaucrats are influential actors in policy-making are core questions of Public Administration (PA) research; however, most studies have focused on executive bureaucracies, while their legislative counterparts have received only limited attention. Now that a new research agenda on parliamentary administrations has emerged, this article seeks to bridge the gap between PA and legislative studies to compare and contrast bureaucratic influence in both branches. For this purpose, the article introduces established determinants of influence in the study of governmental administrations and applies them to the legislature. It shows that, based on the dominant configuration of individual, organisational and institutional factors, the likelihood of specific modes of bureaucratic influence is different from governmental administrations. Generally, however, these modes of influence are not exclusive to governments or parliaments but rather contingent on the specific politico-administrative setting, revealing several avenues for future research.

First published online: 5 May 2021 ; How can we better understand the architecture of government? Governmental structures are regularly altered by the dispersion of power upward and downward to supranational and subnational bodies. The preferences of citizens and élites in this regard are well documented at the national and EU levels. However, the preferences of regional élites remain somewhat of a black box. What are their preferences when it comes to the distribution of competences across the regional-national-EU triptych? This article pits three explanations against one another. They concern scale, identity, and institutional effects. These explanations are evaluated against a database containing information on over 1,300 regional élites in 68 regions and 12 countries. Overall, while scale and institutional logics do play a role, identity logics prevail. These findings support a strand of literature stressing the importance of community and attachment in shaping the structure of government beyond what scale and institutional logics predict. ; Akademiaavtalen, SANE-Clim project; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Grant/Award Number: GZ: BA 3658/2-1

First published online : 09 January 2020 ; What happens to public administration when populists are elected into government? This article argues that populists seek to realize an anti-pluralist reform agenda, thereby fuelling trends of democratic backsliding. Against this background, the article discusses potential goals and strategies of populist public administration policy and introduces examples of how populists sought to capture (Orbán in Hungary), dismantle (Fujimori in Peru), sabotage (Trump in the United States), and reform (Blocher in Switzerland) the state bureaucracy. In doing so, populists in government aim at structures, resources, personnel, norms, and accountability relationships. The examples suggest that populist public administration policies can have profound impact on policymaking and democracy, underlining the need for a broader research agenda on this issue area.

Die Europäische Kommission ist das supranationale Exekutivorgan der Europäischen Union. Sie bereitet Gesetze vor und kontrolliert deren Einhaltung, verwaltet gemeinsam mit den Mitgliedstaaten den EU-Haushalt und übernimmt etliche Koordinierungsfunktionen. Zum 1. Dezember 2019 hat mit Ursula von der Leyen erstmals eine Frau das Spitzenamt der Kommission übernommen. Ihre Nominierung war allerdings nicht unumstritten. Mit Spannung wird daher erwartet, welche Rolle die Kommission unter ihrer neuen Präsidentin spielen wird. Tritt sie, wie unter Vorgänger Jean-Claude Juncker, weiterhin selbstbewusst auf? Oder interpretiert sie ihre Rolle eher als "Sekretariat" der Mitgliedstaaten? Dieser Beitrag analysiert die Steuerungsmöglichkeiten der neuen Kommission in einem zunehmend politisierten Umfeld.

Mit Blick auf die Bürokratie als zentrales Instrument staatlicher Herrschaftsausübung entwickelt dieser Beitrag einen Analyserahmen, der populistische Verwaltungspolitik als Transformation der öffentlichen Verwaltung erfassbar macht. Die analytische Leistungsfähigkeit dieses Ansatzes sowie dessen empirische Relevanz werden an vier Beispielen populistischer Verwaltungspolitik illustriert: Viktor Orbán in Ungarn, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Christoph Blocher in der Schweiz und Donald Trump in den USA. Der Beitrag verdeutlicht, welche Gefahren für liberaldemokratische Systeme von populistischen Regierungen ausgehen. Denn der Grad der Verwirklichung populistischer Verwaltungspolitik bestimmt letztendlich die Durchsetzungschancen einer auf radikale Veränderung abzielenden politischen Ideologie. ; Against the background of bureaucracies being central instruments of state power, this article develops a framework to capture populist policies to transform public administration. The analytical value and empirical relevance of this framework is illustrated by four examples of populist public administration policies: Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Alberto Fujimori (Peru), Christoph Blocher (Switzerland) and Donald Trump (United States). The article further underlines the threat populist governments pose to liberal-democratic systems, for the realization of populist public administration policies raises the chances of a radical ideology being implemented.

[Abstract] Over the past 50 years, an increasing amount of political authority has been delegated to the regional government level in Europe. This paper analyses regional demands for involvement in policy-making by focusing on the preferences of top-level regional civil servants ("regio-crats"). A survey (n=347) of regio-crats in 60 regions of 5 European Union member states serves as the empirical basis for the analysis of regional demands for policy involvement in the multilevel system. The data reveal differential patterns of demands. By and large, regio-crats emerge as being conservative, incremental and modest in their wishes for greater policy involvement, except where the regional contexts are characterised by substantial emancipatory political ambitions or cultural distinctiveness. Regional demands for policy participation in the multilevel system are pragmatic, patch-worked and incremental, and more conservative than transformative

Over the past 50 years, an increasing amount of political authority has been delegated to the regional government level in Europe. This paper analyses regional demands for involvement in policy-making by focusing on the preferences of top-level regional civil servants ("regio-crats"). A survey (n=347) of regio-crats in 60 regions of 5 European Union member states serves as the empirical basis for the analysis of regional demands for policy involvement in the multilevel system. The data reveal differential patterns of demands. By and large, regio-crats emerge as being conservative, incremental and modest in their wishes for greater policy involvement, except where the regional contexts are characterised by substantial emancipatory political ambitions or cultural distinctiveness. Regional demands for policy participation in the multilevel system are pragmatic, patch-worked and incremental, and more conservative than transformative.

Over the past 50 years, an increasing amount of political authority has been delegated to the regional government level in Europe. This paper analyses regional demands for involvement in policy-making by focusing on the preferences of top-level regional civil servants ("regio-crats"). A survey (n=347) of regio-crats in 60 regions of 5 European Union member states serves as the empirical basis for the analysis of regional demands for policy involvement in the multilevel system. The data reveal differential patterns of demands. By and large, regio-crats emerge as being conservative, incremental and modest in their wishes for greater policy involvement, except where the regional contexts are characterised by substantial emancipatory political ambitions or cultural distinctiveness. Regional demands for policy participation in the multilevel system are pragmatic, patch-worked and incremental, and more conservative than transformative.

First published online : 08 August 2020 ; The Covid-19 pandemic affects societies worldwide, challenging not only health sectors but also public administration systems in general. Understanding why public administrations perform well in the current situation—and in times of crisis more generally—is theoretically of great importance, and identifying concrete factors driving successful administrative performance under today's extraordinary circumstances could still improve current crisis responses. This article studies patterns of sound administrative performance with a focus on networks and knowledge management within and between crises. Subsequently, it draws on empirical evidence from two recent public administration surveys conducted in Germany in order to test derived hypotheses. The results of tests for group differences and regression analyses demonstrate that administrations that were structurally prepared, learned during preceding crises, and displayed a high quality in their network cooperation with other administrations and with the civil society, on average, performed significantly better in the respective crises.

Although cabinets in the European Commission have attracted considerable interest, scholarly attention has mainly focused on their composition and influence. How the status of cabinets or the relations between them have changed over time, and how cabinets have been affected by changes to the wider institutional environment, has gone largely unexamined. This article takes a step towards filling that gap. It argues that, despite apparent stability in the functions that cabinets perform, the cabinet system has undergone a quiet transformation. A new differentiation has created hierarchical relations within the cabinet system, with implications for policy coordination and output. Using historical institutionalist theory, the article shows that Commission cabinets have been affected less by reforms addressed directly at them and more by internal rule change aimed at other parts of their institutional environment.

First published online: 16 March 2021 ; The article investigates how international public administrations, as corporate actors, influence policymaking within international organizations. Starting from a conception of international organizations as political-administrative systems, we theorize the strategies international bureaucrats may use to affect international organizations' policies and the conditions under which these strategies vary. Building on a most-likely case design, we use process tracing to study two cases of bureaucratic influence: the influence of the secretariat of the World Health Organization on the "Global action plan for the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases"; and the influence of the International Labour Office on the "Resolution concerning decent work in global supply chains". We use interview material gathered from international public administration staff and stakeholders to illustrate varying influence strategies and the conditions under which these strategies are used. The study shows how and when international public administrations exert policy influence, and offers new opportunities to extend the generalizability of public administration theories.

First published online : 21 June 2019 ; An impressive amount of evidence has been collected underpinning the importance of international public administrations (i.e., the secretariats of international governmental organizations) in a variety of policy areas, actor configurations, and multilevel political contexts. However, the problem of how to systematically observe and explain bureaucratic influence still lies at the core of the research puzzles that scholars presently attempt to solve. While acknowledging the achievements of recent research efforts, we argue that it is no coincidence that the results remain rather scattered and disconnected—as no consensus has been reached about how bureaucratic influence beyond nation states might be reasonably defined or reliably observed and how the individual insights gained could feed into the construction of a more general theory of bureaucratic influence in transnational governance. Based on a review of the literature, the essay describes what we see as the characteristic pitfalls of current research and presents two modest proposals on how the underlying challenges can be addressed. We first suggest defining the target of influence in terms of a particular policy and second advocate the inclusion of bureaucratic policy preferences into the influence concept. In order to help researchers to observe and compare policy influence across IPAs, we present a simple heuristic measurement scheme, which, if systematically applied, may help overcome the central ailment of recent influence studies. We demonstrate the applicability of the scheme by means of two empirical illustrations. The argument is that in the absence of a comprehensive descriptive, let alone analytical, theory of bureaucratic influence in transnational policymaking, our proposal may help to boost the accumulative potential of current research in the area.

This chapter investigates actions for annulment. Annulment actions constitute a central yet by-and-large neglected device of judicial review in the European Union. We focus on cases in which member states take the European Commission to the Court of Justice of the European Union in order to fend off interferences with domestic policy application. Specifically, we ask when and why member states initiate such actions for annulment. To assess the validity of different answers to this question, we use data on the frequency of annulment litigation and evaluate the impact of four potential explanatory factors: the creative agency of the supervising Commission, the inept application of EU law by a shirking agent government, the heterogeneity of preferences held by the collective principal (i.e., the Council), and the interruption of the relationship between the commission and member state governments. ; Gegenstand der Analyse in diesem Kapitel sind Nichtigkeitsklagen vor dem Europäischen Gerichtshof. Nichtigkeitsklagen sind eine zentrale, aber bisher weitgehend unerforschte Kategorie der Normenkontrolle im EU System. Wir untersuchen solche Klagefälle, in denen Mitgliedstaaten, um Eingriffe in nationale Politikgestaltung abzuwehren, die Europäische Kommission vor dem Europäischen Gerichtshof verklagen. Wann und warum entscheiden sich nationale Regierungen für eine solche Nichtigkeitsklage? Um diese Frage zu beantworten werden vier potentielle Erklärungsfaktoren mit Hilfe von quantitativen Daten zur Häufigkeit der Klageerhebung in der EU-15 getestet: kreatives Handeln der Kommission als Agentin, unangemessene Anwendung durch eine pflichtverletzende nationale Regierung, heterogene Präferenzen im Rat als kollektivem Prinzipal und die Unterbrechung der Beziehung zwischen Kommission und mitgliedstaatlicher Regierung, z.B. durch Wahlen oder die Benennung eines neuen Kommissars