Marleen Brans
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 4079643 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Marleen Brans |
| PRENOMES | Marleen |
| SOBRENOME | Brans |
| ASSINATURA | BRANS M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | KU Leuven |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0468-2929 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 49 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 257 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1992 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
The Impact of Public Administration Education on Individual Policy Capacity of Federal Civil Servants in Ethiopia
In recent decades, policy capacity has garnered increasing attention from scholars in the Global North. However, there has been limited focus on policy capacity in developing countries, particularly in Africa. While various factors, such as experience, the nature of policy tasks, and educational background, can influence the policy capacity of civil servants, there is still little known about the extent to which public administration (PA) learnin…
From classroom to bureaucracy
Public Administration (PA) teaching aims to prepare the next generation of public sector professionals. Given its strong connection to practice, it should align with civil service requirements. Research on the relationship between PA teaching and public sector professions in Africa in general, and in Ethiopia in particular, is scarce. Using a deductive content analysis approach, this study examines the competencies required in the civil service a…
Stepping stones or party placements? Post-ministerial cabinet careers of Belgian ministerial advisers (1999–2020)
What do ministerial advisers do once they leave office? This article examines the post-ministerial cabinet careers of Belgian federal advisers, analyzing whether these trajectories reflect individual stepping stones or party-driven placements. Using a new dataset of 6107 career positions held by 767 advisers (1999–2020), we test two perspectives. The first posits that cabinet service accelerates career advancement by providing political and admin…
A career dataset of Flemish ministerial advisors (1999–2020) leveraging online data sources
This research note introduces a dataset on the career paths of 754 Flemish ministerial advisors (MAs) spanning from 1999 to 2020. The dataset offers comprehensive insights into variables such as gender and age distribution, educational backgrounds, and career trajectories of MAs. To develop this dataset, we employed a suite of software tools designed for data collection, cleaning, and coding. This note details both the tools used and the resultin…
The multifaceted nature of trust in the uptake of advice
What makes policy advice circulate more easily towards the apex of governments and shape the opinions of its users along the way? This article investigates the utilization of policy advice in ministerial cabinets, by focusing on the individuals appointed to work as closest aides of ministers: ministerial advisers. While we know quite a lot about the operation of policy advisory systems at the macro and meso levels, the micro-dispositions affectin…
More equal than different? Gender and legislative turnover in the European Parliament and west European legislatures
The article investigates incumbent exit rates of women and men parliamentarians in the national chambers and European Parliament delegations of eight West European countries after elections. Relying on original data, the article uses a multi-level model to analyse the fixed effects of gender, type of delegation, and the politico-institutional context on incumbent exit rates, while also assessing random effects produced at the country level. The s…
Decabinetisation as a presidentialisation strategy
This paper develops and empirically tests the novel concept of ‘decabinetisation’, a type of depoliticisation reform that affects the advisory and support offices of executive politicians. Reforms that restrict and constrain the work of ministerial advisers and reduce the political resources of ministers are puzzling, even more so when pressure to reform ministerial offices is absent. To understand why governments undermine a system that has been…
Policy advisory bodies during crises
Background: The COVID-19 policy context was characterised by high levels of uncertainty, imperfect knowledge and the need for immediate action. Therefore, governments in Europe tended to rely on expertise provided by advisory bodies to design their crisis response. Advisory bodies played a fundamental part in policy making during the crisis to optimise policy formulation. Aims and objectives: During the COVID-19 crisis, the literature on policy a…
The Potential for Political Scientists to Remain Relevant
Brans and Timmermans respond to Flinders' concerns about the potential irrelevance of political science due to the pressures of impact regimes. Based on a 2018 survey of 12,400 European political scientists, they show that 80% of political scientists actively engage in policy advising. They identify four advisory roles: Pure Academic, Expert, Opinionating Scholar, and Public Intellectual, with most political scientists fitting the Opinionating Sc…
Ministerial Advisers as Power Resources
In this article, we argue that the entourage of ministerial advisers available to prime ministers and other ministers is an institutional power resource that can serve as a useful indicator to measure the changing nature of the political executive. Two novel contributions are made utilising four new datasets on ministerial advisers coupled with a comparative analysis of 21 governments in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, in varying date…
Out of the ivory tower
The relevance and impact of political scientists’ professional activities outside of universities has become the focus of public attention, partly due to growing expectations that research should help address society’s grand challenges. One type of such activity is policy advising. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the extent and type of policy advising activities political scientists engage in. This paper addresses this…
The prime minister's chief of staff
Chiefs of Staff to heads of government hold a prominent position at the apex of the political executive. However, our knowledge of the personal and professional backgrounds of these unelected actors is surprisingly patchy. Not only is this an empirical gap, but it is also problematic as interactions between actors within political executives shape political decisions and ministerial operations. For this study, we present the most systematic datas…
Social innovation & governance
Findings from a large and growing body of transdisciplinary research offer useful insights for a deeper understanding of the relationships between social innovation and governance. In this article, social innovation (SI) is defined as practices that aim to satisfy neglected human needs, based on collective actions and tighter social relations, potentially generating socio-political transformations. Governance is defined as ‘new ways of governing’…
Academic policy advice in consensus-seeking countries
Research on policy-advisory systems worldwide has shown that historically dominant sources of advice traditionally located in-house to the government have been increasingly supplemented by other actors and outside knowledge. However, the vast majority of research has concentrated on the anglophone context. Yet, countries with a consensus-seeking, neo-corporatist tradition provide a special case in terms of policy advice and merit more scholarly a…
Transformational party events and legislative turnover in West European democracies, 1945–2015
This paper examines the influence of party change on party-level legislative turnover. Analyzing a novel dataset tracking 251 parties in eight West European democracies between 1945 and 2015, we assess how transformational party events affect the renewal of parties’ parliamentary delegations. Transformational party events refers to party changes resulting from deliberate strategic decisions that redistribute power within parties, change their ide…
Government Ministers and Their “Special” Advisers
Double book review : Richard Shaw and Chris Eichbaum. 2018. Ministers, Minders and Mandarins: an International Study of Relationships at the Executive Summit of Parliamentary Democracies. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 240 pp. Yee-Fui Ng. 2018. The Rise of Political Advisors in the Westminster System. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 188 pp
Policy advisory styles in the francophone Belgian civil service
In a context of the rising importance of ministerial advisers, this article provides empirical evidence about the nature of involvement of civil servants in policy work. Based on a survey of graduated civil servants in francophone Belgium, it shows that civil servants are much involved in policy work even in a politico-administrative system characterised by strong ministerial cabinets. Belgian francophone civil servants are ‘incidental advisors’.…
Fostering a local energy transition in a post-socialist policy setting
The politics of bureaucracy in the face of different legal futures
status: Published
Where Comparative Public Administration and Comparative Policy Studies Meet
Comparative public administration studies the capacity of government and public actors to design and implement policies. This article in the JCPA anniversary issue discusses similarities and differences between comparative public administration and comparative public policy. It does so using the concept of policy capacity, a capacity that is supplied by public actors and institutions. It shows where comparative public policy and comparative publi…
Determinants of legislative turnover in Western Europe, 1945–2015
This article explains legislative turnover in eight West European legislatures over 152 general elections in the period 1945–2015. Turnover is measured as the rate of individual membership change in unicameral or lower chambers. It is the outcome of a legislative recruitment process with a supply and a demand side. Decisions made by contenders affect supply, while decisions made by parties and voters influence demand. Such decisions are shaped by…
Policy analysis in Belgium
Policy Analysis in Belgium
Policy Analysis in Belgium
Policy Analysis in Belgium
This book presents the first systematic overview of policy analysis activities in Belgium. Contributors from both sides of the Dutch-French language border use original empirical data to provide a comprehensive, comparative study of multi-level policy-making both within and outside government.
The politics of Belgium
This volume seeks to provide an integrated understanding of the Belgian political system through the prism of comparative politics. The transformation of the political system from a unitary into a federal system is used as a connecting theme linking the contributions. The volume is divided in two parts. The first part touches upon the sociological and institutional determinants of policy-making in Belgium, such as the dynamics of the Belgian fede…
Determinants of legislative turnover in Western Europe, 1945–2015
This article explains legislative turnover in eight West European legislatures over 152 general elections in the period 1945–2015. Turnover is measured as the rate of individual membership change in unicameral or lower chambers. It is the outcome of a legislative recruitment process with a supply and a demand side. Decisions made by contenders affect supply, while decisions made by parties and voters influence demand. Such decisions are shaped by…
The Autopoiesis of Administrative Systems
This article offers an introduction to Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems as it pertains to public administration and policy, as a first step towards both a critique and its empirical application to empirical reality. It reconstructs Luhmann’s early writings on bureaucracy and policy‐making and shows how this early, more empirical work grounded his abstract theory of social systems in general and the political system in particular. The art…
Institutionalized advisory systems
Policy-making in Flanders (Belgium) is traditionally characterized by a dense advisory system with a high number of advisory councils, firmly integrated into the policy-making process. Recently, the Flemish government has reshaped its strategic advisory council system, responding to concerns over growing advice competition. This reorganization was part of a broader reform aimed at increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of policies. In this a…
Organisational analytical capacity
Checklists for evaluation capacity builders include a wide range of building blocks for supporting evaluation activity. Yet, the relative importance of each building block is not clear. The purpose of this article is to identify the capacity related factors that are necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, for organisations that wish to institutionalise high quality policy evaluations. To retrieve these factors, we rely on the necessity functio…
Comparative observations on tensions between professional policy advice and political control in the Low Countries
In politico-administrative relations, there is an always-existing tension between professional policy advice and political control. In this article, we would like to focus on this tension from a comparative perspective. The Netherlands and Belgium have broadly similar state institutions; they vary considerably as to the way in which professional policy advice is combined with political control. The Dutch case is traditionally characterized by a s…
Managing Public Consultation
This article addresses the question of how governments can set up and manage, in an increasingly complex policy environment, processes of public consultation that lead to good outcomes. Drawing upon insights of democratic theory and literature on network and interactive governance, the article discusses the organization and outcomes of public consultation processes. The analysis of four Belgian cases shows that the absence of open process rules d…
Academic policy advice in consensus-seeking countries
Research on policy-advisory systems worldwide has shown that historically dominant sources of advice traditionally located in-house to the government have been increasingly supplemented by other actors and outside knowledge. However, the vast majority of research has concentrated on the anglophone context. Yet, countries with a consensus-seeking, neo-corporatist tradition provide a special case in terms of policy advice and merit more scholarly a…
Administrative reform in Belgium
This article aims to analyse, classify and explain similarities and differences in administrative reform in four separate Belgian administrations along four internationally observed trends in administrative reform: Organisation, personnel, strategy, and finance. Comparatively, Flanders can be classified as an early moderniser, followed by the federal government, which had been locked longer in a trajectory of maintenance. The French-speaking gove…
European Commissioner cabinet advisers
The article investigates the substantive and dimensional aspect of advisers’ policy work in the cabinets of European Commissioners. Advisers’ roles are mapped using Connaughton's (2010a) typology of four adviser types and Maley's (2015) framework of three arenas. Using data collected via a survey and follow‐up face‐to‐face interviews with European Commissioner cabinet advisers in the Juncker Commission in 2015, it is shown that the majority of th…
Theories of Local Government Reorganization
Local government reorganization has been widespread throughout Europe in the postwar era. Three broad types of theory have set out to explain this phenomenon in a cross‐national context; a welfare state perspective, a functional revolution perspective and a political perspective. The validity of these theories is assessed in the specific context of Belgium. The evidence suggests that none of the prevailing theories can make much headway in explai…
Ministerial Advisers as Power Resources
In this article, we argue that the entourage of ministerial advisers available to prime ministers and other ministers is an institutional power resource that can serve as a useful indicator to measure the changing nature of the political executive. Two novel contributions are made utilising four new datasets on ministerial advisers coupled with a comparative analysis of 21 governments in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, in varying date…
Validating Methods for Comparing Public Policy
status: Published
Policy advisory styles in the francophone Belgian civil service
In a context of the rising importance of ministerial advisers, this article provides empirical evidence about the nature of involvement of civil servants in policy work. Based on a survey of graduated civil servants in francophone Belgium, it shows that civil servants are much involved in policy work even in a politico-administrative system characterised by strong ministerial cabinets. Belgian francophone civil servants are ‘incidental advisors’.…
Competency Frameworks in The Belgian Governments
The Belgian Federal government and the Belgian Flemish government have picked up competency management as a multifaceted tool to suit their own visions of organizational change rather than simply responding to a new management trend in the private sector. Both governments have used it to foster both vertical and horizontal integration in their fragmented administrations, and to deal with problems of recruitment and retention of qualified personne…
Governing without Government
More equal than different? Gender and legislative turnover in the European Parliament and west European legislatures
The article investigates incumbent exit rates of women and men parliamentarians in the national chambers and European Parliament delegations of eight West European countries after elections. Relying on original data, the article uses a multi-level model to analyse the fixed effects of gender, type of delegation, and the politico-institutional context on incumbent exit rates, while also assessing random effects produced at the country level. The s…
Taking Care of Policy in Times of Crisis
When the financial crisis hit the Eurozone, Belgium, along with several other countries, postponed its consolidation policies until after the general elections. What followed was the longest caretaker rule that any stable democracy had ever experienced. This article analyses the phenomenon of policy continuity and change during this double crisis. It illustrates how the exogenous economic crisis overrode the endogenous political crisis, showing t…
Transformational party events and legislative turnover in West European democracies, 1945–2015
This paper examines the influence of party change on party-level legislative turnover. Analyzing a novel dataset tracking 251 parties in eight West European democracies between 1945 and 2015, we assess how transformational party events affect the renewal of parties’ parliamentary delegations. Transformational party events refers to party changes resulting from deliberate strategic decisions that redistribute power within parties, change their ide…
Where Comparative Public Administration and Comparative Policy Studies Meet
Comparative public administration studies the capacity of government and public actors to design and implement policies. This article in the JCPA anniversary issue discusses similarities and differences between comparative public administration and comparative public policy. It does so using the concept of policy capacity, a capacity that is supplied by public actors and institutions. It shows where comparative public policy and comparative publi…
Policy-oriented foresight as evidence for policy making
This article approaches policy-oriented foresight as a particular kind of evidence aimed at supporting and developing policies. Through a comparative case study, the article investigates the different ways in which evidence from policy-oriented foresight is used by policy makers. In explaining the factors behind differences in use between the cases, the findings emphasise the importance of the involvement of policy makers,stakeholder support, and…
Systematic evaluation of public participation projects
Fostering a local energy transition in a post-socialist policy setting
The Europeanization of Public Administration teaching
Making Public Administration Teaching and Theory Relevant
The academic field of Public Administration is quite diverse in Europe, ranging from applications of basic public law on the one hand to analyses of the hollow state on the other (where it is difficult to find any clear-cut public organisation). Nonetheless, in the light of societal changes towards late modernity, post-modern conditions and globalisation, there are some common challenges that sooner or later may knock at the door of all universit…
Theories of Local Government Reorganization
Local government reorganization has been widespread throughout Europe in the postwar era. Three broad types of theory have set out to explain this phenomenon in a cross‐national context; a welfare state perspective, a functional revolution perspective and a political perspective. The validity of these theories is assessed in the specific context of Belgium. The evidence suggests that none of the prevailing theories can make much headway in explai…
High-Tech Problem-Solving in a Multi-Cultural State
Challenges to the Practice and Theory of Public Administration in Europe
Over the past two decades the practice of public administration has moved away from a monocentric understanding of the nature of policy-making and implementation towards a pluricentric one. Since the European Union conforms even less closely to a monocentric model of bureaucracy than do the government structures of member states, pluricentric theories have a particular relevance to European Union administration since they offer the possibility of…
The Autopoiesis of Administrative Systems
This article offers an introduction to Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems as it pertains to public administration and policy, as a first step towards both a critique and its empirical application to empirical reality. It reconstructs Luhmann’s early writings on bureaucracy and policy‐making and shows how this early, more empirical work grounded his abstract theory of social systems in general and the political system in particular. The art…
Competency Frameworks in The Belgian Governments
The Belgian Federal government and the Belgian Flemish government have picked up competency management as a multifaceted tool to suit their own visions of organizational change rather than simply responding to a new management trend in the private sector. Both governments have used it to foster both vertical and horizontal integration in their fragmented administrations, and to deal with problems of recruitment and retention of qualified personne…
Comparative observations on tensions between professional policy advice and political control in the Low Countries
In politico-administrative relations, there is an always-existing tension between professional policy advice and political control. In this article, we would like to focus on this tension from a comparative perspective. The Netherlands and Belgium have broadly similar state institutions; they vary considerably as to the way in which professional policy advice is combined with political control. The Dutch case is traditionally characterized by a s…
Administrative reform in Belgium
This article aims to analyse, classify and explain similarities and differences in administrative reform in four separate Belgian administrations along four internationally observed trends in administrative reform: Organisation, personnel, strategy, and finance. Comparatively, Flanders can be classified as an early moderniser, followed by the federal government, which had been locked longer in a trajectory of maintenance. The French-speaking gove…
The politics of Belgium
This volume seeks to provide an integrated understanding of the Belgian political system through the prism of comparative politics. The transformation of the political system from a unitary into a federal system is used as a connecting theme linking the contributions. The volume is divided in two parts. The first part touches upon the sociological and institutional determinants of policy-making in Belgium, such as the dynamics of the Belgian fede…
Making Public Administration Teaching and Theory Relevant
The academic field of Public Administration is quite diverse in Europe, ranging from applications of basic public law on the one hand to analyses of the hollow state on the other (where it is difficult to find any clear-cut public organisation). Nonetheless, in the light of societal changes towards late modernity, post-modern conditions and globalisation, there are some common challenges that sooner or later may knock at the door of all universit…
Systematic evaluation of public participation projects
Continuity and Change in Belgium's Caretaker Administration
The fact that Belgian politicians did not succeed in forming a government coalition following the June 2010 elections did not prevent public managers and civil servants to guarantee the continuity of government operations. Leading civil servants, whether as departmental managers or as ministerial advisors simply continued to function. Complying with caretaker government conventions, they followed a line of permanence and caution, while urgent mat…
Comparative Public Administration
International Agreements and the Salience of Domestic Politics
International environmental agreements aim at orienting national policies towards the promotion of more sustainable behaviors by national actors. However, international agreements can affect national policies only if states are willing and capable of incorporating international obligations into their national legislations (enactment) and ensuring their application (or execution) and enforcement. The article analyzes the domestic implementation of…
Managing Public Consultation
This article addresses the question of how governments can set up and manage, in an increasingly complex policy environment, processes of public consultation that lead to good outcomes. Drawing upon insights of democratic theory and literature on network and interactive governance, the article discusses the organization and outcomes of public consultation processes. The analysis of four Belgian cases shows that the absence of open process rules d…
Governing without Government
Outsource Versus In-House? An Identification of Organizational Conditions Influencing the Choice for Internal or External Evaluators
An evaluation can be conducted in-house or can be outsourced to an external party. Yet organizations do not always have full discretion to decide on the locus for evaluation implementation. Certain attributes often push the organization in one direction or another. Via a systematic pairwise comparison of attributes of 18 organizations in the Flemish (Belgian) public sector, we were able to indicate the conditions that matter most in determining t…
Policy-oriented foresight as evidence for policy making
This article approaches policy-oriented foresight as a particular kind of evidence aimed at supporting and developing policies. Through a comparative case study, the article investigates the different ways in which evidence from policy-oriented foresight is used by policy makers. In explaining the factors behind differences in use between the cases, the findings emphasise the importance of the involvement of policy makers,stakeholder support, and…
Institutionalized advisory systems
Policy-making in Flanders (Belgium) is traditionally characterized by a dense advisory system with a high number of advisory councils, firmly integrated into the policy-making process. Recently, the Flemish government has reshaped its strategic advisory council system, responding to concerns over growing advice competition. This reorganization was part of a broader reform aimed at increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of policies. In this a…
Organisational analytical capacity
Checklists for evaluation capacity builders include a wide range of building blocks for supporting evaluation activity. Yet, the relative importance of each building block is not clear. The purpose of this article is to identify the capacity related factors that are necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, for organisations that wish to institutionalise high quality policy evaluations. To retrieve these factors, we rely on the necessity functio…
Comparative Public Policy in Europe
status: Published
Introduction to the New JCPA Comparative Syllabi Section
Nurturing the next generation of comparative policy analysts can not only be achieved through fruitful research discussions, but also relies upon the comparative research and methods we convey to students in our educational programs. This is the introduction to first issue of the special JCPA section on comparative course syllabi
The Europeanization of Public Administration teaching
Taking Care of Policy in Times of Crisis
When the financial crisis hit the Eurozone, Belgium, along with several other countries, postponed its consolidation policies until after the general elections. What followed was the longest caretaker rule that any stable democracy had ever experienced. This article analyses the phenomenon of policy continuity and change during this double crisis. It illustrates how the exogenous economic crisis overrode the endogenous political crisis, showing t…
Policy analysis in Belgium
Policy Analysis in Belgium
Political science (46 obras) · Law (32 obras) · Public Administration (32 obras) · Law (31 obras) · Politics (31 obras) · Public Administration (30 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Public Policy and Administration Research (21 obras) · Economics (20 obras) · Government (linguistics (15 obras)