Madalina Busuioc
Biographic Data
| ID | 4383742 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Madalina Busuioc |
| GIVEN NAMES | Madalina |
| FAMILY NAME | Busuioc |
| SIGNATURE | BUSUIOC M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8838-8895 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 665 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Who benefits from stakeholder consultations? Fire alarms or procedural politicking?
Stakeholder consultations have become increasingly common. By allowing societal interests to provide input on regulatory proposals, stakeholder consultations are meant to bolster the input legitimacy of regulatory decisions. Yet, despite a wealth of scholarship on stakeholder participation in EU regulatory processes, it is still unclear how stakeholder consultations affect the traditional democratic oversight of regulatory agencies. Following sem…
Legislative oversight of EU agencies through hearings
European Parliament hearings are a core mechanism of oversight of EU agencies, largely understudied in extant literature. Drawing on a unique dataset of hand-coded minutes of 1314 meetings held by the 12 parliamentary parent committees of EU agencies, we investigate how the EP deploys hearings in its account-holding role. We are guided in our investigation by the influential framework of ‘police patrol’ vs. ‘fire alarm’ oversight. The framework s…
Algorithmic discrimination in public service provision
As public bodies increasingly adopt AI technologies in their work, there is simultaneously growing attention to the risk that the reliance on the technology may introduce biases and produce discriminatory administrative outcomes, as demonstrated by multiple real-world cases. Our contribution addresses a core theoretical puzzle: with AI algorithms being increasingly embedded across public services, we lack crucial knowledge about how citizens assi…
Independent agencies, credible policies? The role of prior beliefs in shaping stakeholder perceptions of credibility in a contested environment
Agency independence is understood to instil credibility in regulatory policy. This is a core tenet of regulation theory, foundational to the EU regulatory state's own origin story. We put the assumption to rigorous testing, in addition to expanding on it theoretically. We expect that stakeholder perceptions of credibility depend not only on agencies' institutional insulation, but also on whether regulatory outcomes are congruent with stakeholders…
Public administration meets artificial intelligence
Our contribution aims to propose a novel research agenda for behavioural public administration (BPA) regarding one of the most important developments in the public sector nowadays: the incorporation of artificial intelligence into public sector decision-making. We argue that this raises the prospect of distinct set of biases and challenges for decision-makers and citizens, that arise in the human-algorithm interaction, and that thus far remain un…
Human–AI Interactions in Public Sector Decision Making
Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly adopted as decisional aides by public bodies, with the promise of overcoming biases of human decision-makers. At the same time, they may introduce new biases in the human–algorithm interaction. Drawing on psychology and public administration literatures, we investigate two key biases: overreliance on algorithmic advice even in the face of “warning signals” from other sources (automation bias), a…
EU agencies’ stakeholder bodies
EU agencies are increasingly subject to a flurry of stakeholder bodies. Despite their prevalence, and the considerable variation in structures formally professed to serve the same purpose, we know little about the actor preferences driving the set-up of such structures or the potential implications of specific institutional design choices. We systematically map structural variations across EU agencies and analyse to what extent the establishment …
Meeting expectations in the EU regulatory state? Regulatory communications amid conflicting institutional demands
European Union agencies are crucial institutional agents of the EU regulatory state. As such, they are faced with multiple expectations from a broad array of audiences. Reputation literature teaches us that the process of how organisations manage the expectations of their multifaceted audiences is central to organisational reputation. However, there has been little research about the diverse aspects of organisational reputation that EU agencies c…
Reputation‐Sourced Authority and the Prospect of Unchecked Bureaucratic Power
We explore the democratic implications of a reputational account of bureaucratic authority. While an influential literature has examined the relevance of reputation—and mutual exchange between principals and agents in public organizations generally—the normative implications of these insights have largely escaped scrutiny. We discuss how reputation‐building impacts both the ability and the motivation of principals to oversee administrative policy…
Accountable Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms govern in subtle yet fundamental ways the way we live and are transforming our societies. The promise of efficient, low‐cost, or “neutral” solutions harnessing the potential of big data has led public bodies to adopt algorithmic systems in the provision of public services. As AI algorithms have permeated high‐stakes aspects of our public existence—from hiring and education decisions to the governmental use …
A Multidimensional Reputation Barometer for Public Agencies
Reputation is of growing interest for the study of public bureaucracies, but a measurement that can discern between the subdimensions of reputation and is validated on real‐life audiences has remained elusive. The authors deductively build, test, and cross‐validate a survey instrument through two surveys of 2,100 key stakeholders of the European Chemicals Agency, the European Union chemicals regulator. This empirical tool measures an agency's rep…
Stakeholder engagement as a conduit for regulatory legitimacy
Stakeholder engagement practices are on the rise in regulatory governance. This raises an important question regarding implications for regulatory legitimacy. Engagement mechanisms are not by default legitimizing: Even when initiated to tap into an array of 'benevolent' desiderata, unless carefully balanced and built-for-purpose, they can become conduits for de-legitimation. Much like Schrödinger's cat, neither dead nor alive, so too can stakehol…
The promise of bureaucratic reputation approaches for the EU regulatory state
Daniel Carpenter’s influential account painstakingly demonstrates the relevance of reputation to bureaucratic ‘power’ and to early institutional state-building in the US context. We argue that adopting a reputational lens provides important insights for the EU regulatory state, the evolution of its regulatory agents, and their efforts at legitimation. This contribution proposes a novel research agenda by applying core bureaucratic reputation conc…
Reputation and Accountability Relationships
Accountability is said to be about the management of expectations. Empirical studies reveal considerable variation in organizational interest, intensity, and investment in accountability relationships. Less is known, however, about what explains these observed variations. Drawing on accountability and reputation‐concerned literatures, this article argues that a reputation‐based perspective on accountability offers an underlying logic that explain…
The Reputational Basis of Public Accountability
This article proposes a reputation‐based approach to account for two core puzzles of accountability. The first is the misfit between behavioral predictions of the hegemonic political science framework for talking about accountability, namely, principal–agent, and empirical findings. The second puzzle is the unrivaled popularity of accountability, given evidence that supposedly accountability‐enhancing measures often lead to opposite effects. A “r…
Friend or Foe? Inter‐agency Cooperation, Organizational Reputation, and Turf
This article aims to explain two contrasting cases of bureaucratic cooperation: the cooperation practices of two similar European agencies – Europol and Frontex – with corresponding national‐level structures. To understand why cooperation has proceeded smoothly in one case (border management), while triggering strong turf‐protective tendencies in the other (law enforcement), the article develops a theoretical approach to cooperation that is both …
Predicting Public Sector Accountability
Principal-agent theory has been the dominant theory at the heart of public sector accountability research. The notion of the potentially drifting agent-such as independent public agencies, opaque transnational institutions, or recalcitrant street-level bureaucrats-has been the guiding paradigm in empirical accountability research. The aim of this article is first of all to signal the limits of principal-agent theory as a predictive model of how a…
European Agencies
European agencies have been created at a rapid pace in recent years in a multitude of diverse fields from pharmaceuticals to financial supervision. This book examines how the accountability system of these agencies operates formally and in practice studying the legal provisions in place and their de facto implementation.
Working for Europe? Socialization in the European Commission and Agencies of the European Union
The trend towards flexible career arrangements has not left EU institutions untouched, as is manifest in the growing reliance on temporary and part‐time officials. How does the increasing career hybridity within and across EU institutions affect European socialization, i.e. the extent to which officials embody the spirit of ‘working for Europe’ and adopt supranational norms? We conceptualize European socialization as a mutually reinforcing proces…
Building E uropean U nion capacity to manage transboundary crises
In recent years, the E uropean continent has witnessed a substantial number of “transboundary crises” – crises that cross geographical borders and affect multiple policy domains. Nation states find it hard to deal with such crises by themselves. International cooperation, thus, becomes increasingly important, but it is not clear what shape or form that cooperation should take. This article explores the growing role of the E uropean U nion ( EU ) …
European agencies and their boards
European agencies have become an established part of the European Union's architectural set up and are the most proliferating institutional entities at the EU level. However, as their relevance and prevalence in the EU institutional landscape has increased, so have concerns about the possibility for such bodies to escape scrutiny. This article investigates a central element of agency accountability: their accountability vis-à-vis the management b…
Agency growth between autonomy and accountability
Autonomy and accountability of public agencies are two sides of the same coin, yet often they are examined separately and at only one point in time. This contribution therefore examines the interaction between accountability and autonomy over time. It does so in the context of a European Union agency, the European Police Office (Europol), the creation of which has been the subject of much contestation and discussion in terms of its possibility to…
The Reputational Basis of Public Accountability
This article proposes a reputation‐based approach to account for two core puzzles of accountability. The first is the misfit between behavioral predictions of the hegemonic political science framework for talking about accountability, namely, principal–agent, and empirical findings. The second puzzle is the unrivaled popularity of accountability, given evidence that supposedly accountability‐enhancing measures often lead to opposite effects. A “r…
Predicting Public Sector Accountability
Principal-agent theory has been the dominant theory at the heart of public sector accountability research. The notion of the potentially drifting agent-such as independent public agencies, opaque transnational institutions, or recalcitrant street-level bureaucrats-has been the guiding paradigm in empirical accountability research. The aim of this article is first of all to signal the limits of principal-agent theory as a predictive model of how a…
Friend or Foe? Inter‐agency Cooperation, Organizational Reputation, and Turf
This article aims to explain two contrasting cases of bureaucratic cooperation: the cooperation practices of two similar European agencies – Europol and Frontex – with corresponding national‐level structures. To understand why cooperation has proceeded smoothly in one case (border management), while triggering strong turf‐protective tendencies in the other (law enforcement), the article develops a theoretical approach to cooperation that is both …
Human–AI Interactions in Public Sector Decision Making
Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly adopted as decisional aides by public bodies, with the promise of overcoming biases of human decision-makers. At the same time, they may introduce new biases in the human–algorithm interaction. Drawing on psychology and public administration literatures, we investigate two key biases: overreliance on algorithmic advice even in the face of “warning signals” from other sources (automation bias), a…
The promise of bureaucratic reputation approaches for the EU regulatory state
Daniel Carpenter’s influential account painstakingly demonstrates the relevance of reputation to bureaucratic ‘power’ and to early institutional state-building in the US context. We argue that adopting a reputational lens provides important insights for the EU regulatory state, the evolution of its regulatory agents, and their efforts at legitimation. This contribution proposes a novel research agenda by applying core bureaucratic reputation conc…
Meeting expectations in the EU regulatory state? Regulatory communications amid conflicting institutional demands
European Union agencies are crucial institutional agents of the EU regulatory state. As such, they are faced with multiple expectations from a broad array of audiences. Reputation literature teaches us that the process of how organisations manage the expectations of their multifaceted audiences is central to organisational reputation. However, there has been little research about the diverse aspects of organisational reputation that EU agencies c…
Stakeholder engagement as a conduit for regulatory legitimacy
Stakeholder engagement practices are on the rise in regulatory governance. This raises an important question regarding implications for regulatory legitimacy. Engagement mechanisms are not by default legitimizing: Even when initiated to tap into an array of 'benevolent' desiderata, unless carefully balanced and built-for-purpose, they can become conduits for de-legitimation. Much like Schrödinger's cat, neither dead nor alive, so too can stakehol…
Building E uropean U nion capacity to manage transboundary crises
In recent years, the E uropean continent has witnessed a substantial number of “transboundary crises” – crises that cross geographical borders and affect multiple policy domains. Nation states find it hard to deal with such crises by themselves. International cooperation, thus, becomes increasingly important, but it is not clear what shape or form that cooperation should take. This article explores the growing role of the E uropean U nion ( EU ) …
European agencies and their boards
European agencies have become an established part of the European Union's architectural set up and are the most proliferating institutional entities at the EU level. However, as their relevance and prevalence in the EU institutional landscape has increased, so have concerns about the possibility for such bodies to escape scrutiny. This article investigates a central element of agency accountability: their accountability vis-à-vis the management b…
EU agencies’ stakeholder bodies
EU agencies are increasingly subject to a flurry of stakeholder bodies. Despite their prevalence, and the considerable variation in structures formally professed to serve the same purpose, we know little about the actor preferences driving the set-up of such structures or the potential implications of specific institutional design choices. We systematically map structural variations across EU agencies and analyse to what extent the establishment …
Agency growth between autonomy and accountability
Autonomy and accountability of public agencies are two sides of the same coin, yet often they are examined separately and at only one point in time. This contribution therefore examines the interaction between accountability and autonomy over time. It does so in the context of a European Union agency, the European Police Office (Europol), the creation of which has been the subject of much contestation and discussion in terms of its possibility to…
Working for Europe? Socialization in the European Commission and Agencies of the European Union
The trend towards flexible career arrangements has not left EU institutions untouched, as is manifest in the growing reliance on temporary and part‐time officials. How does the increasing career hybridity within and across EU institutions affect European socialization, i.e. the extent to which officials embody the spirit of ‘working for Europe’ and adopt supranational norms? We conceptualize European socialization as a mutually reinforcing proces…
Independent agencies, credible policies? The role of prior beliefs in shaping stakeholder perceptions of credibility in a contested environment
Agency independence is understood to instil credibility in regulatory policy. This is a core tenet of regulation theory, foundational to the EU regulatory state's own origin story. We put the assumption to rigorous testing, in addition to expanding on it theoretically. We expect that stakeholder perceptions of credibility depend not only on agencies' institutional insulation, but also on whether regulatory outcomes are congruent with stakeholders…
Algorithmic discrimination in public service provision
As public bodies increasingly adopt AI technologies in their work, there is simultaneously growing attention to the risk that the reliance on the technology may introduce biases and produce discriminatory administrative outcomes, as demonstrated by multiple real-world cases. Our contribution addresses a core theoretical puzzle: with AI algorithms being increasingly embedded across public services, we lack crucial knowledge about how citizens assi…
Agency growth between autonomy and accountability
Autonomy and accountability of public agencies are two sides of the same coin, yet often they are examined separately and at only one point in time. This contribution therefore examines the interaction between accountability and autonomy over time. It does so in the context of a European Union agency, the European Police Office (Europol), the creation of which has been the subject of much contestation and discussion in terms of its possibility to…
European agencies and their boards
European agencies have become an established part of the European Union's architectural set up and are the most proliferating institutional entities at the EU level. However, as their relevance and prevalence in the EU institutional landscape has increased, so have concerns about the possibility for such bodies to escape scrutiny. This article investigates a central element of agency accountability: their accountability vis-à-vis the management b…
European Agencies
European agencies have been created at a rapid pace in recent years in a multitude of diverse fields from pharmaceuticals to financial supervision. This book examines how the accountability system of these agencies operates formally and in practice studying the legal provisions in place and their de facto implementation.
Working for Europe? Socialization in the European Commission and Agencies of the European Union
The trend towards flexible career arrangements has not left EU institutions untouched, as is manifest in the growing reliance on temporary and part‐time officials. How does the increasing career hybridity within and across EU institutions affect European socialization, i.e. the extent to which officials embody the spirit of ‘working for Europe’ and adopt supranational norms? We conceptualize European socialization as a mutually reinforcing proces…
Building E uropean U nion capacity to manage transboundary crises
In recent years, the E uropean continent has witnessed a substantial number of “transboundary crises” – crises that cross geographical borders and affect multiple policy domains. Nation states find it hard to deal with such crises by themselves. International cooperation, thus, becomes increasingly important, but it is not clear what shape or form that cooperation should take. This article explores the growing role of the E uropean U nion ( EU ) …
Friend or Foe? Inter‐agency Cooperation, Organizational Reputation, and Turf
This article aims to explain two contrasting cases of bureaucratic cooperation: the cooperation practices of two similar European agencies – Europol and Frontex – with corresponding national‐level structures. To understand why cooperation has proceeded smoothly in one case (border management), while triggering strong turf‐protective tendencies in the other (law enforcement), the article develops a theoretical approach to cooperation that is both …
Predicting Public Sector Accountability
Principal-agent theory has been the dominant theory at the heart of public sector accountability research. The notion of the potentially drifting agent-such as independent public agencies, opaque transnational institutions, or recalcitrant street-level bureaucrats-has been the guiding paradigm in empirical accountability research. The aim of this article is first of all to signal the limits of principal-agent theory as a predictive model of how a…
Reputation and Accountability Relationships
Accountability is said to be about the management of expectations. Empirical studies reveal considerable variation in organizational interest, intensity, and investment in accountability relationships. Less is known, however, about what explains these observed variations. Drawing on accountability and reputation‐concerned literatures, this article argues that a reputation‐based perspective on accountability offers an underlying logic that explain…
The Reputational Basis of Public Accountability
This article proposes a reputation‐based approach to account for two core puzzles of accountability. The first is the misfit between behavioral predictions of the hegemonic political science framework for talking about accountability, namely, principal–agent, and empirical findings. The second puzzle is the unrivaled popularity of accountability, given evidence that supposedly accountability‐enhancing measures often lead to opposite effects. A “r…
Meeting expectations in the EU regulatory state? Regulatory communications amid conflicting institutional demands
European Union agencies are crucial institutional agents of the EU regulatory state. As such, they are faced with multiple expectations from a broad array of audiences. Reputation literature teaches us that the process of how organisations manage the expectations of their multifaceted audiences is central to organisational reputation. However, there has been little research about the diverse aspects of organisational reputation that EU agencies c…
Reputation‐Sourced Authority and the Prospect of Unchecked Bureaucratic Power
We explore the democratic implications of a reputational account of bureaucratic authority. While an influential literature has examined the relevance of reputation—and mutual exchange between principals and agents in public organizations generally—the normative implications of these insights have largely escaped scrutiny. We discuss how reputation‐building impacts both the ability and the motivation of principals to oversee administrative policy…
Accountable Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms govern in subtle yet fundamental ways the way we live and are transforming our societies. The promise of efficient, low‐cost, or “neutral” solutions harnessing the potential of big data has led public bodies to adopt algorithmic systems in the provision of public services. As AI algorithms have permeated high‐stakes aspects of our public existence—from hiring and education decisions to the governmental use …
A Multidimensional Reputation Barometer for Public Agencies
Reputation is of growing interest for the study of public bureaucracies, but a measurement that can discern between the subdimensions of reputation and is validated on real‐life audiences has remained elusive. The authors deductively build, test, and cross‐validate a survey instrument through two surveys of 2,100 key stakeholders of the European Chemicals Agency, the European Union chemicals regulator. This empirical tool measures an agency's rep…
Stakeholder engagement as a conduit for regulatory legitimacy
Stakeholder engagement practices are on the rise in regulatory governance. This raises an important question regarding implications for regulatory legitimacy. Engagement mechanisms are not by default legitimizing: Even when initiated to tap into an array of 'benevolent' desiderata, unless carefully balanced and built-for-purpose, they can become conduits for de-legitimation. Much like Schrödinger's cat, neither dead nor alive, so too can stakehol…
The promise of bureaucratic reputation approaches for the EU regulatory state
Daniel Carpenter’s influential account painstakingly demonstrates the relevance of reputation to bureaucratic ‘power’ and to early institutional state-building in the US context. We argue that adopting a reputational lens provides important insights for the EU regulatory state, the evolution of its regulatory agents, and their efforts at legitimation. This contribution proposes a novel research agenda by applying core bureaucratic reputation conc…
EU agencies’ stakeholder bodies
EU agencies are increasingly subject to a flurry of stakeholder bodies. Despite their prevalence, and the considerable variation in structures formally professed to serve the same purpose, we know little about the actor preferences driving the set-up of such structures or the potential implications of specific institutional design choices. We systematically map structural variations across EU agencies and analyse to what extent the establishment …
Human–AI Interactions in Public Sector Decision Making
Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly adopted as decisional aides by public bodies, with the promise of overcoming biases of human decision-makers. At the same time, they may introduce new biases in the human–algorithm interaction. Drawing on psychology and public administration literatures, we investigate two key biases: overreliance on algorithmic advice even in the face of “warning signals” from other sources (automation bias), a…
Public administration meets artificial intelligence
Our contribution aims to propose a novel research agenda for behavioural public administration (BPA) regarding one of the most important developments in the public sector nowadays: the incorporation of artificial intelligence into public sector decision-making. We argue that this raises the prospect of distinct set of biases and challenges for decision-makers and citizens, that arise in the human-algorithm interaction, and that thus far remain un…
Legislative oversight of EU agencies through hearings
European Parliament hearings are a core mechanism of oversight of EU agencies, largely understudied in extant literature. Drawing on a unique dataset of hand-coded minutes of 1314 meetings held by the 12 parliamentary parent committees of EU agencies, we investigate how the EP deploys hearings in its account-holding role. We are guided in our investigation by the influential framework of ‘police patrol’ vs. ‘fire alarm’ oversight. The framework s…
Algorithmic discrimination in public service provision
As public bodies increasingly adopt AI technologies in their work, there is simultaneously growing attention to the risk that the reliance on the technology may introduce biases and produce discriminatory administrative outcomes, as demonstrated by multiple real-world cases. Our contribution addresses a core theoretical puzzle: with AI algorithms being increasingly embedded across public services, we lack crucial knowledge about how citizens assi…
Independent agencies, credible policies? The role of prior beliefs in shaping stakeholder perceptions of credibility in a contested environment
Agency independence is understood to instil credibility in regulatory policy. This is a core tenet of regulation theory, foundational to the EU regulatory state's own origin story. We put the assumption to rigorous testing, in addition to expanding on it theoretically. We expect that stakeholder perceptions of credibility depend not only on agencies' institutional insulation, but also on whether regulatory outcomes are congruent with stakeholders…
Who benefits from stakeholder consultations? Fire alarms or procedural politicking?
Stakeholder consultations have become increasingly common. By allowing societal interests to provide input on regulatory proposals, stakeholder consultations are meant to bolster the input legitimacy of regulatory decisions. Yet, despite a wealth of scholarship on stakeholder participation in EU regulatory processes, it is still unclear how stakeholder consultations affect the traditional democratic oversight of regulatory agencies. Following sem…
Political science (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Public relations (17 works) · Business (15 works) · Public Administration (13 works) · Public Administration (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Accountability (7 works)