Morten Egeberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 2560465 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Morten Egeberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Morten |
| FAMILY NAME | Egeberg |
| SIGNATURE | EGEBERG M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8979-7359 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 895 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
International organizations, the EU and peace among member states: Bringing organization structure in
Well-functioning states are often seen as great pacifiers in the sense that serious societal disputes within their respective territories are usually solved without violence. On the other hand, deep conflicts between states may more easily result in violent situations due to the partly anarchical character of the international system. One could therefore expect that studies of war and peace focused extensively on various ways of organizing inters…
Explaining government bureaucrats’ behaviour: On the relative importance of organizational position, demographic background, and political attitudes
A basic insight in public administration research is that career officials play an important role in public policy development as well as in its implementation. Surprisingly, however, despite being an enduring theme on the research agenda, the jury still seems to be out regarding how to account for bureaucrats’ actual decision behaviour, a fact reflected in the numerous competing theories and perspectives available. By applying a novel large-N qu…
Policy design or organizational design: On the relevance of the study of public policy and administration
Whether the relevance and usefulness of a scientific discipline should be a major concern seems contested. To some, scientific research is dedicated to knowledge per se and a human spirit of inquiry. Nevertheless, the theme of scientific relevance is an enduring theme. This also holds for political science where ‘relevance’ is occasionally placed on the formal research agenda (e.g., Holmberg and Rothstein 2012; Stoker et al. 2015). However, argua…
Le recrutement au mérite favorise la bonne gouvernance: Comment les agences de l’Union européenne recrutent-elles leur personnel
Les études montrent que les administrations publiques qui pratiquent le recrutement au mérite sont nettement moins touchées par la corruption que les autres. Les données sont nombreuses sur la situation des États membres de l’U.E. en ce qui concerne le degré de recrutement au mérite au sein de leurs administrations, ainsi que sur les résultats de l’administration de la Commission européenne à cet égard. En revanche, on en sait beaucoup moins sur …
Merit-based recruitment boosts good governance: How do European Union agencies recruit their personnel
Studies show that public administrations that practise merit-based recruitment of their personnel are significantly less marked by corruption than administrations that do not recruit in this manner. While we know a lot about how EU member states score with regard to the degree of merit-based recruitment within their administrations, and also how the European Commission administration performs in this respect, recruitment practices within the incr…
Organization theory
The argument outlined in this chapter is that organizational factors (independent variables) might intervene in governance processes (dependent variables) and create a systematic bias, thus making some process characteristics and outputs more likely than others. It is argued that applying organizational theory to governance may be useful in at least two respects. First, it may add new knowledge on how different governance architectures shape gove…
Why Strong Coordination at One Level of Government Is Incompatible With Strong Coordination Across Levels (And How to Live With It): The Case of the European Union
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 practice…
The quest for order: Unravelling the relationship between the European Commission and European Union agencies
Over the past couple of decades a considerable number of European Union (EU) agencies have been established. Research has so far shown that they have become more than mere facilitators of transnational regulatory networks, arenas for the exchange of information on 'best practice', and vehicles for member state governments. Task expansion has taken place, e.g., by taking up (quasi-) regulatory tasks. However, the jury is still out regarding exactl…
People Who Run the European Parliament: Staff Demography and Its Implications
With few exceptions, parliament administrations, including secretariat officials and party group staff, have been relatively unexplored. However, a small, but growing, literature on the administration of the European Parliament (EP) indicates that officials play a role in the policy process that goes beyond technical and procedural questions. On this background, this article therefore aims at, first, finding out who the people working in the EP s…
The European Commission: From Agent to Political Institution
A Not So Technocratic Executive? Everyday Interaction between the European Parliament and the Commission
The European Commission, although generally portrayed as a technocratic, non-majoritarian institution, or as an agent of EU member governments, has become increasingly linked to the European Parliament (EP) through a range of semi-parliamentary measures intended to increase the executive's legitimacy and accountability. In this article we argue that in addition to several highly visible and often treaty-based control instruments, an almost symbio…
Parliament staff: Unpacking the behaviour of officials in the European Parliament
Officials within parliaments have received marginal scholarly attention. This also holds for the European Parliament (EP) which contains a considerable administration. This study, based on an online survey (N = 118), shows that political group staff are primarily committed to the concerns of their respective political groups, but also to the arguments of those external actors which have similar party affiliation. Since most group officials are, i…
How Bureaucratic Structure Matters: An Organizational erspective
Experiments in Supranational Institution-Building: The European Commission as a Laboratory
Classical international organizations are formally governed by ministers who have their primary institutional affiliation at the national level. The European Commission, on the other hand, represents a notable organizational innovation in the way that executive politicians at the top, i.e., the commissioners, have their primary institutional affiliation at the international level. Thus, the Commission constitutes a 'laboratory' for experiments in…
EU-level agencies: New Executive Centre Formation or Vehicles for National Control
The jury is still out with respect to whether European Union (EU)-level agencies act primarily as tools of national governments or not, although parts of the literature as well as the legal framework of EU agencies seem to favour the former interpretation. We argue that EU agencies which might be able to act relatively independently of national governments and the Council, but not necessarily independently from the Commission, would contribute to…
L'administration de l'union européenne: Niveaux multiples et construction d'un centre
Les administrations nationales, ou plus précisément des sections d’administrations nationales, sont devenues, jusqu’à un certain point, des parties intégrantes de l’appareil administratif européen. Cela est dû à un développement institutionnel très particulier : au niveau européen, d’une part, grâce au renforcement de la Commission comme instance exécutive relativement indépendante et au niveau national, d’autre part, grâce à la tendance à la cré…
The Denationalization of Cabinets in the European Commission
The 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. O…
National Agencies in the European Administrative Space: Government Driven, Commission Driven or Networked
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 departments and the European Commission. Applying large‐N questionnaire data, this article follows up these studies by investigating how important various institutions are with respe…
Political Leadership and Bureaucratic Autonomy: Effects of Agencification
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 …
Tradition and innovation: Europe's accumulated executive order
We argue in this article that Europe has in fact had a kind of executive order for centuries but that we only now see that the contours of this order are qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past. We ascribe this phenomenon in particular to the consolidation of the European Commission as a new and distinctive executive centre at the European level. It seems as if this institutional innovation triggers signif…
European Government(s): Executive Politics in Transition
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 ab…
Multilevel Union Administration: The Transformation of Executive Politics in Europe
This book shows that the executive branch of government has added a supranational level, namely the European Commission, that increasingly seems to operate independently from national governments. Cas
Executive politics as usual: Role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the College of European Commissioners
While role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have been fairly well documented, studies on the internal functioning of the College of the European Commission have been almost lacking. Thus, highly inconsistent images exist; ranging from portraying Commissioners as mainly independent Europeanists on the one hand, to seeing them as primarily national 'ambassadors' on the other. Althoug…
EU Institutions and the Transformation of European-Level Politics: How to Understand Profound Change (If It Occurs)
An organisational approach to European integration: Outline of a complementary perspective
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’ pref…
Political Leadership and Bureaucratic Autonomy: Effects of Agencification
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 …
The many faces of EU committee governance
Committees linking national administrations and the EU level play a crucial role at all stages of the EU policy process. The literature tends to portray this group system as a coherent mass, characterised by expert-oriented 'deliberative supranationalism', a term developed through studies of comitology (implementation) committees. This article builds on survey data of 218 national officials in 14 member states who have attended EU committee meeti…
National Agencies in the European Administrative Space: Government Driven, Commission Driven or Networked
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 departments and the European Commission. Applying large‐N questionnaire data, this article follows up these studies by investigating how important various institutions are with respe…
Transcending intergovernmentalism? Identity and role perceptions of national officials in EU decision-making
Focusing on the identity and role perceptions of national officials in EU policy-making, intergovernmentalism may be transcended in two different ways. First, as asserted by neo-functionalists, national elites may shift their loyalty from a national to a supranational level owing to the effect of EU institutions. Second, as could perhaps be interpreted as the argument of the functionalists, functional role orientations acquired in sectoral minist…
Executive politics as usual: Role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the College of European Commissioners
While role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have been fairly well documented, studies on the internal functioning of the College of the European Commission have been almost lacking. Thus, highly inconsistent images exist; ranging from portraying Commissioners as mainly independent Europeanists on the one hand, to seeing them as primarily national 'ambassadors' on the other. Althoug…
The Impact of Bureaucratic Structure on Policy Making
Students of public administration have often focused on behaviour and attitudes without relating them explicitly to bureaucratic structure. They have also concentrated on structural descriptions, and on reorganization processes. These steps are, beyond doubt, necessary and important. However, connecting structure and policy making in order to learn about the consequences of alternative arrangements can be assumed to be the ultimate concern of aca…
EU-level agencies: New Executive Centre Formation or Vehicles for National Control
The jury is still out with respect to whether European Union (EU)-level agencies act primarily as tools of national governments or not, although parts of the literature as well as the legal framework of EU agencies seem to favour the former interpretation. We argue that EU agencies which might be able to act relatively independently of national governments and the Council, but not necessarily independently from the Commission, would contribute to…
An organisational approach to European integration: Outline of a complementary perspective
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’ pref…
Parliament staff: Unpacking the behaviour of officials in the European Parliament
Officials within parliaments have received marginal scholarly attention. This also holds for the European Parliament (EP) which contains a considerable administration. This study, based on an online survey (N = 118), shows that political group staff are primarily committed to the concerns of their respective political groups, but also to the arguments of those external actors which have similar party affiliation. Since most group officials are, i…
Differentiated Integration in Europe: The Case of EEA Country, Norway
Why Strong Coordination at One Level of Government Is Incompatible With Strong Coordination Across Levels (And How to Live With It): The Case of the European Union
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 practice…
Tradition and innovation: Europe's accumulated executive order
We argue in this article that Europe has in fact had a kind of executive order for centuries but that we only now see that the contours of this order are qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past. We ascribe this phenomenon in particular to the consolidation of the European Commission as a new and distinctive executive centre at the European level. It seems as if this institutional innovation triggers signif…
Experiments in Supranational Institution-Building: The European Commission as a Laboratory
Classical international organizations are formally governed by ministers who have their primary institutional affiliation at the national level. The European Commission, on the other hand, represents a notable organizational innovation in the way that executive politicians at the top, i.e., the commissioners, have their primary institutional affiliation at the international level. Thus, the Commission constitutes a 'laboratory' for experiments in…
The quest for order: Unravelling the relationship between the European Commission and European Union agencies
Over the past couple of decades a considerable number of European Union (EU) agencies have been established. Research has so far shown that they have become more than mere facilitators of transnational regulatory networks, arenas for the exchange of information on 'best practice', and vehicles for member state governments. Task expansion has taken place, e.g., by taking up (quasi-) regulatory tasks. However, the jury is still out regarding exactl…
A Not So Technocratic Executive? Everyday Interaction between the European Parliament and the Commission
The European Commission, although generally portrayed as a technocratic, non-majoritarian institution, or as an agent of EU member governments, has become increasingly linked to the European Parliament (EP) through a range of semi-parliamentary measures intended to increase the executive's legitimacy and accountability. In this article we argue that in addition to several highly visible and often treaty-based control instruments, an almost symbio…
Organization and Nationality in the European Commission Services
Existing literature on the internal functioning of the European Commission services indicates that officials’nationality does have an impact on their policy‐making behaviour. Students of western national administrations on the other hand, have found the geographical and social backgrounds of officials to be highly insignificant. However, given the unresolved tension between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism in the European Union, this see…
How federal? The organizational dimension of integration in the EU (and elsewhere)
To figure out what kind of polity the EU is developing into, contending approaches to European integration apply quite different criteria. This article argues that the new institutional perspective could be strengthened considerably by specifying the organizational principles embodied in a given institutional structure. If the task is to integrate sub-territories, a highly integrated system is, in organizational terms, a system in which non-terri…
Bureaucrats as Public Policy-Makers and Their Self-Interests
That public bureaucrats, like most other people, might pursue their private interests as voters, job applicants and union members is hardly surprising. It is the postulate that bureaucrats' self-interested behavior penetrates their role as public decision-makers that represents a challenge, empirical-theoretically as well as normatively. To assess the assumption that bureaucrats' self-interests affect bureaucrats' decisions in their capacity as o…
Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice: The Case of Administrative Policy
The discipline of public administration could play a more constructive role in the field of administrative policy if the gap between empirical‐theoretical research and the professional role of political scientists in governments were bridged. This article outlines an instrumental or “action‐oriented” model which provides a theoretical framework through which to focus on formal organizational, demographic and physical structures of institutions as…
European Government(s): Executive Politics in Transition
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 ab…
The Fourth Level of Government: On the Standardization of Public Policy within International Regions
Both in the literature and in public documents one usually operates with three levels of government: local, regional, and national. This may be partly due to a common perception of coordination and standardization as something that takes place only through hierarchical forms of organization. However, if we realize that coordination and standardization may also take place through other organizational forms, as for instance bargaining, consultation…
Organized Grour>Government Relations in Norway: On the Structured Selection of Participants, Problems, Solutions, and Choice Opportunities
This article reviews the nature of direct interest organizational participation in government in Norway. Organizational involvement, while high, varies markedly across different kinds of associations and issues. Activities are concentrated in the two organizational forms of the committee and remiss systems. The analysis of the linkage patterns with the ministries suggests that corporatism is a somewhat inadequate concept for describing the Norweg…
The Denationalization of Cabinets in the European Commission
The 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. O…
People Who Run the European Parliament: Staff Demography and Its Implications
With few exceptions, parliament administrations, including secretariat officials and party group staff, have been relatively unexplored. However, a small, but growing, literature on the administration of the European Parliament (EP) indicates that officials play a role in the policy process that goes beyond technical and procedural questions. On this background, this article therefore aims at, first, finding out who the people working in the EP s…
Merit-based recruitment boosts good governance: How do European Union agencies recruit their personnel
Studies show that public administrations that practise merit-based recruitment of their personnel are significantly less marked by corruption than administrations that do not recruit in this manner. While we know a lot about how EU member states score with regard to the degree of merit-based recruitment within their administrations, and also how the European Commission administration performs in this respect, recruitment practices within the incr…
Organized Grour>Government Relations in Norway: On the Structured Selection of Participants, Problems, Solutions, and Choice Opportunities
This article reviews the nature of direct interest organizational participation in government in Norway. Organizational involvement, while high, varies markedly across different kinds of associations and issues. Activities are concentrated in the two organizational forms of the committee and remiss systems. The analysis of the linkage patterns with the ministries suggests that corporatism is a somewhat inadequate concept for describing the Norweg…
The Fourth Level of Government: On the Standardization of Public Policy within International Regions
Both in the literature and in public documents one usually operates with three levels of government: local, regional, and national. This may be partly due to a common perception of coordination and standardization as something that takes place only through hierarchical forms of organization. However, if we realize that coordination and standardization may also take place through other organizational forms, as for instance bargaining, consultation…
Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice: The Case of Administrative Policy
The discipline of public administration could play a more constructive role in the field of administrative policy if the gap between empirical‐theoretical research and the professional role of political scientists in governments were bridged. This article outlines an instrumental or “action‐oriented” model which provides a theoretical framework through which to focus on formal organizational, demographic and physical structures of institutions as…
The Policy-Administration Dichotomy Revisited: The Case of Transport Infrastructure Planning in Norway
This article presents a study devised by Norway's road department and its railway department to assess the effect of institutional factors on their plans and investment levels. Norway's administrative doctrine, policy making, and institutions are reviewed as they pertain to this study. The author examines the planning process of the road and railway institutions in terms of process, comprehensiveness, and diversity in key decisionmakers. The road…
Bureaucrats as Public Policy-Makers and Their Self-Interests
That public bureaucrats, like most other people, might pursue their private interests as voters, job applicants and union members is hardly surprising. It is the postulate that bureaucrats' self-interested behavior penetrates their role as public decision-makers that represents a challenge, empirical-theoretically as well as normatively. To assess the assumption that bureaucrats' self-interests affect bureaucrats' decisions in their capacity as o…
Organization and Nationality in the European Commission Services
Existing literature on the internal functioning of the European Commission services indicates that officials’nationality does have an impact on their policy‐making behaviour. Students of western national administrations on the other hand, have found the geographical and social backgrounds of officials to be highly insignificant. However, given the unresolved tension between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism in the European Union, this see…
The Impact of Bureaucratic Structure on Policy Making
Students of public administration have often focused on behaviour and attitudes without relating them explicitly to bureaucratic structure. They have also concentrated on structural descriptions, and on reorganization processes. These steps are, beyond doubt, necessary and important. However, connecting structure and policy making in order to learn about the consequences of alternative arrangements can be assumed to be the ultimate concern of aca…
Differentiated Integration in Europe: The Case of EEA Country, Norway
Transcending intergovernmentalism? Identity and role perceptions of national officials in EU decision-making
Focusing on the identity and role perceptions of national officials in EU policy-making, intergovernmentalism may be transcended in two different ways. First, as asserted by neo-functionalists, national elites may shift their loyalty from a national to a supranational level owing to the effect of EU institutions. Second, as could perhaps be interpreted as the argument of the functionalists, functional role orientations acquired in sectoral minist…
How federal? The organizational dimension of integration in the EU (and elsewhere)
To figure out what kind of polity the EU is developing into, contending approaches to European integration apply quite different criteria. This article argues that the new institutional perspective could be strengthened considerably by specifying the organizational principles embodied in a given institutional structure. If the task is to integrate sub-territories, a highly integrated system is, in organizational terms, a system in which non-terri…
How Bureaucratic Structure Matters: An Organizational Perspective
The many faces of EU committee governance
Committees linking national administrations and the EU level play a crucial role at all stages of the EU policy process. The literature tends to portray this group system as a coherent mass, characterised by expert-oriented 'deliberative supranationalism', a term developed through studies of comitology (implementation) committees. This article builds on survey data of 218 national officials in 14 member states who have attended EU committee meeti…
An organisational approach to European integration: Outline of a complementary perspective
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’ pref…
EU Institutions and the Transformation of European-Level Politics: How to Understand Profound Change (If It Occurs)
Multilevel Union Administration: The Transformation of Executive Politics in Europe
This book shows that the executive branch of government has added a supranational level, namely the European Commission, that increasingly seems to operate independently from national governments. Cas
Executive politics as usual: Role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the College of European Commissioners
While role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have been fairly well documented, studies on the internal functioning of the College of the European Commission have been almost lacking. Thus, highly inconsistent images exist; ranging from portraying Commissioners as mainly independent Europeanists on the one hand, to seeing them as primarily national 'ambassadors' on the other. Althoug…
Tradition and innovation: Europe's accumulated executive order
We argue in this article that Europe has in fact had a kind of executive order for centuries but that we only now see that the contours of this order are qualitatively different from the intergovernmental order inherited from the past. We ascribe this phenomenon in particular to the consolidation of the European Commission as a new and distinctive executive centre at the European level. It seems as if this institutional innovation triggers signif…
European Government(s): Executive Politics in Transition
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 ab…
National Agencies in the European Administrative Space: Government Driven, Commission Driven or Networked
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 departments and the European Commission. Applying large‐N questionnaire data, this article follows up these studies by investigating how important various institutions are with respe…
Political Leadership and Bureaucratic Autonomy: Effects of Agencification
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 …
L'administration de l'union européenne: Niveaux multiples et construction d'un centre
Les administrations nationales, ou plus précisément des sections d’administrations nationales, sont devenues, jusqu’à un certain point, des parties intégrantes de l’appareil administratif européen. Cela est dû à un développement institutionnel très particulier : au niveau européen, d’une part, grâce au renforcement de la Commission comme instance exécutive relativement indépendante et au niveau national, d’autre part, grâce à la tendance à la cré…
The Denationalization of Cabinets in the European Commission
The 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. O…
EU-level agencies: New Executive Centre Formation or Vehicles for National Control
The jury is still out with respect to whether European Union (EU)-level agencies act primarily as tools of national governments or not, although parts of the literature as well as the legal framework of EU agencies seem to favour the former interpretation. We argue that EU agencies which might be able to act relatively independently of national governments and the Council, but not necessarily independently from the Commission, would contribute to…
How Bureaucratic Structure Matters: An Organizational erspective
Experiments in Supranational Institution-Building: The European Commission as a Laboratory
Classical international organizations are formally governed by ministers who have their primary institutional affiliation at the national level. The European Commission, on the other hand, represents a notable organizational innovation in the way that executive politicians at the top, i.e., the commissioners, have their primary institutional affiliation at the international level. Thus, the Commission constitutes a 'laboratory' for experiments in…
Political science (36 works) · Law (34 works) · Law (30 works) · Public Administration (27 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (25 works) · Public Administration (25 works) · Economics (20 works) · European union (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Commission (17 works)