J Pierre
Biographic Data
| ID | 8309 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Pierre |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Pierre |
| SIGNATURE | PIERRE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Gothenburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1523-3603 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 93 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1661 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 92 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
You’re gonna need a bigger boat: Understanding politicization in the populist era
Our conventional understanding of politicization highlights a variety of strategies used by the political leadership to increase its control of the public service. The recent emergence of populist and/or autocratic regimes in advanced democracies has exacerbated these tendencies. However, we lack a framework that allows us to capture opposition within the public service to the tightening grip of autocratic leaders of the public servants or the po…
Back to Basics: A Comparative Analysis of Government Performance in Governing
While the positive aspects, but also pathologies, of performance measurement and management are today well known, we know less about the impact of NPM reform on governance.Using Bertelsmann SGI data (2009 and 2022) from 30 advanced democracies and a unique dataset measuring NPM reform in 14 countries, we study how core aspects of governing capacity have been impacted by, or triggered as responses to, public management reform.While the executive c…
More than medicine: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a social and political challenge that can be overcome
Free riding is not the problem: How agency, heterogeneity and authority challenge collective action against antimicrobial resistance in the European Union
This paper outlines a contextual approach to the governance of collective action in high complexity contexts. Using the major public health threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Europe as empirical case, we investigate the coordination challenges related to a plurality of agency, heterogeneity of capabilities, preferences and institutions, and various degrees and forms of authority. The analysis draws on original quantitative and qualitativ…
The Guardian State: Strengthening the public service against democratic backsliding
Liberal democracy has become vulnerable to illiberal political movements and the gradual erosion of democratic institutions. To safeguard liberal democracy, we propose the concept of the Guardian State, which embraces liberal principles while acting as a defensive barrier against illiberal tendencies. We need strong administrative institutions that uphold liberal democratic norms and resist pressures from populist politicians. Institutionalizing …
The four worlds of politics and administration in the EU: How Institutional Arrangements Shape the Struggle Against Antimicrobial Resistance
Do basic administrative arrangements in the national public sector affect the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and if so, how? AMR, one of humanity’s most pressing challenges according to the World Health Organization, is typically caused by factors inherent to the natural sciences. In this paper, however, we investigate the indirect causal effect of politics and administration on the management of AMR. In a mixed-methodological appr…
Two pandemics: The Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on future AMR collaboration in Europe
Based on 117 responses to a web survey in 29 European countries and interviews with bureaucrats in managerial positions, this paper investigates how people working professionally with antimicrobial resistance (AMR) assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their future long-run cooperation in the struggle against AMR, both within their own country and among the European countries. We measure whether the severity level of the AMR problem, cumu…
Leviathan versus the super bugs: Free riding drives support for EU power over antimicrobial resistance
The Covid-19 pandemic has spurred a discussion about the role of the European Union (EU) in the governance of cross-border health threats. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is another major global health challenge that requires international collective action to be resolved. By using survey data from experts on AMR from 29 European countries, this paper investigates the support for an increase in the power of EU over AMR. Based on insights from coll…
Politicisation of the public service during democratic backsliding: Alternative perspectives
This Research Note explores the issue of politicisation of the public service against the backdrop of the emergence of populism . A common feature of populist governments is a lack of trust in the civil service and its willingness to implement the populist political project. An important consequence of marginalising the civil service and its expertise in policy making is detrimental to policymaking. Also, increasing politicisation, that is replac…
When the cat is away: How institutional autonomy, low salience, and issue complexity shape administrative action
Political issues sometimes display an intriguing combination of high degrees of complexity, low political saliency, and high levels of administrative autonomy. This article investigates how this type of issues shapes the relationship between politicians and the public service. More specifically, we advance the notion of “administrative action space” to describe the emergence of collaborative governance when directives from the political level are…
The Nordic governments' responses to the Covid‐19 pandemic: A comparative study of variation in governance arrangements and regulatory instruments
Government responses to the Covid‐19 pandemic in the Nordic states—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—exhibit similarities and differences. This article investigates the extent to which crisis policymaking diverges from normal policymaking within the Nordic countries and whether variations between the countries are associated with the role of expertise and the level of politicization. Government responses are analyzed in terms of gover…
Bringing political science back into public administration research
The paper critically reviews the consequences of a bifurcation of Political Science and Public Administration. This divorce of two closely related academic fields has removed political explanations to key developments in the public service from Public Administration research and thus it tends to provide a partial view of the reality that it seeks to capture. There are several developments underway in the public sector, which underscore the politi…
Can Anyone Implement the Law? The Discourse and Practice of Externalizing Legal Authority
Allowing private companies to de facto exercise legal authority is becoming increasingly common in several countries. Externalizing legal authority is sustained by a discourse replacing a conventional institutional approach to law enforcement with a functional approach where the agent is less important than efficiency and expected outcomes. Drawing on two brief case studies in Sweden—automobile inspections and reviews of international financial t…
Collaborative gaming: When principals and agents agree to game the system
This paper presents a previously unexplored type of gaming of performance data, collaborative gaming, where the performance measurement system incentivizes the executive and an agency to game collaboratively. The paper shows how overlapping incentives between government departments and agencies to present successful implementation of programs can drive collaboration to modify performance targets and/or performance measurements. The argument is il…
Putting the Peter Parker Principle into Practice: Vertical Policy (Non-)Coordination on CO2 emissions reduction in Germany and Sweden
Vertical coordination is a significant problem in many if not most countries. These problems are exacerbated in policy implementation related to issues that cut across jurisdictional borders. This paper compares policy implementation in the field of climate change, a quintessential example of such cross-cutting issues. In the context of CO2 emissions reduction policies, the Peter Parker principle states that vertical coordination presupposes not …
Nudges against pandemics: Sweden’s Covid-19 containment strategy in perspective
Sweden's strategy to contain the COVID-19 pandemic stands out internationally as more liberal in terms of not ordering a complete lockdown of society. Sweden kept its primary schools, daycare centers and industries largely open. The government financially supported furloughed workers and increased its support to regional and local governments delivering healthcare and elderly care. However, the death toll in Sweden which passed 4000 by late May 2…
From evaluation to auditing and from programs to institutions: Causes and consequences of the decline of the program approach
In the wake of the “audit revolution” during the 1980s and 1990s, administrative systems across the western world have tended to gradually downplay evaluation as a component of the policy process. At the same time, auditing has dramatically increased in scope and depth, and has also, to some extent, come to fill the role in policymaking previously played by evaluation studies. This article reviews this development from the perspective of policyma…
A typology of populism: Understanding the Different Forms of Populism and Their Implications
Populism has become one of the most commonly used concepts in contemporary political science, albeit one which is often contested. Most of the discussion of populism, however, has focused on elections and political party systems. We argue that populist politics can be seen in a number of other dimensions of governance. We develop a typology of populist practices that appear in both democratic and non-democratic political systems, and discuss thei…
Institutions, politicians or ideas? To whom or what are public servants expected to be loyal
Populism and Public Administration: Confronting the Administrative State
Populism has been perhaps the most popular explanation for the difficulties that have been besetting contemporary governments. But despite the intense interest in populism as a political phenomenon, very little has been written assessing the implications for governance and even less on the implications for public administration. Focusing on the United States, but adding some comparative analysis, this article examines the implications of populist…
How do supreme audit institutions manage their autonomy and impact? A comparative analysis
Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) are gradually becoming important agents of public management reform; a development raising issues of autonomy and potential capture by auditees as well as by the political system. Drawing on exploratory case studies of the rules and strategies of four high-performing SAIs – those of Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden – the article shows that SAIs have different approaches to the balance between autonomy an…
Public Administration and Public Management Research in Europe: Traditions and Trends
The chapter reviews the evolution of the state of the art of research in public administration and management in Europe since WWII. It argues that a pan-European community has developed, flanking and in many respects integrating the distinct national communities that characterised the field till the 1970s/1980s. After a bibliographical review of the main themes that catalyse the interest of PA scholars, it focuses on the most researched theme in …
Steering from the Centre: Strengthening Political Control in Western Democracies
Multilevel governance as a strategy to build capacity in cities: Evidence from Sweden
Multilevel governance has opened up important new transnational spaces for cities in their pursuit of policy learning and knowledge building. Knowledge and expertise as elements of urban capacity building are becoming more important as cities are now expected to address increasingly complex issues. Drawing on a case study of the policy internationalization of the city of Gothenburg in Sweden, the article argues that joining international projects…
Comparing local politicians’ and bureaucrats’ assessments of democratic participation: The cases of Norway and Sweden
Given the increasing emphasis on delivery and output as a source of legitimacy for local government, how do politicians and civil servants perceive conventional, input-based channels for citizens’ influence on government in relationship to performance and output-oriented opportunities to influence public service? This article compares the attitudes of senior local politicians and civil servants in Norwegian and Swedish local authorities on these …
Governance Without Government? Rethinking Public Administration
The concept of governance has come to be used more commonly in the discussion of public administration, but the meaning of the term is not always clear. There is a growing body of European literature that can be characterized as "governance without government," stressing as it does the importance of networks, partnerships, and markets (especially international markets). This body of literature can be related to the new public management; yet it h…
The Politics of Path Dependency: Political Conflict in Historical Institutionalism
The conventional critique of institutional theory, and especially historical institutionalism, is that it is incapable of coping with change. We argue for the importance of political conflict as a means of initiating change in an institutionalist framework. In particular, conflict over ideas and the underlying assumptions of policy is important for motivating change. We demonstrate the viability of this argument with examples of institutional cha…
Models of Urban Governance: The Institutional Dimension of Urban Politics
Local governments in Western Europe have become increasingly involved in network building with the local business community. The author suggests that governance processes are not value neutral but reflect and sustain political values beyond partisan conflict. Comparing managerial, corporatist, progrowth, and welfare governance models of urban governance, the author argues that nation-state factors play an important role in shaping urban governanc…
Comparative Urban Governance: Uncovering Complex Causalities
Unlike most other areas of the social sciences, the study of urban politics has been slow in developing a comparative research agenda. This article explores the potential in comparative urban governance research. Urban regime theory does not travel very well, partly because it is an under theorized framework and partly because it is in many ways an abstraction of U.S. urban political economy. To escape these obstacles to comparative research, thi…
Developments in intergovernmental relations: Towards Multi-Level Governance
This issue of Policy & Politics features a series of articles addressing recent developments in intergovernmental relationships in the advanced Western democracies. There is today, we believe, sufficient uniformity in these developments across different jurisidictions to allow a discussion on the causes, mechanisms and consequences of a new or emerging type of relationship between institutions at different levels. While it is also true that inter…
Can Urban Regimes Travel in Time and Space? Urban Regime Theory, Urban Governance Theory, and Comparative Urban Politics
Urban regime theory has shaped the urban politics research agenda in the United States for the past two decades. The article argues that urban regime theory draws on public and corporate behavior and strategies that were typical to the industrial era in the United States. As a result, the theory is insensitive to changes in institutional hierarchies, economic globalization, and the emergence of new types of actors and issues in urban politics. Ur…
The membership of political parties in European democracies, 1960‐1990
State subsidies to political parties: Confronting rhetoric with reality
This article investigates the political impact of the introduction of state subsidies to political parties. The arguments for and against subsidising political parties are outlined. Different models of party subsidies, and their regulatory frameworks, are discussed. We find little evidence of a cross‐national impact of the introduction of party subsidies. The subsidies cannot explain the decline in party membership. Nor is there evidence to sugge…
Populism and Public Administration: Confronting the Administrative State
Populism has been perhaps the most popular explanation for the difficulties that have been besetting contemporary governments. But despite the intense interest in populism as a political phenomenon, very little has been written assessing the implications for governance and even less on the implications for public administration. Focusing on the United States, but adding some comparative analysis, this article examines the implications of populist…
The Guardian State: Strengthening the public service against democratic backsliding
Liberal democracy has become vulnerable to illiberal political movements and the gradual erosion of democratic institutions. To safeguard liberal democracy, we propose the concept of the Guardian State, which embraces liberal principles while acting as a defensive barrier against illiberal tendencies. We need strong administrative institutions that uphold liberal democratic norms and resist pressures from populist politicians. Institutionalizing …
Nudges against pandemics: Sweden’s Covid-19 containment strategy in perspective
Sweden's strategy to contain the COVID-19 pandemic stands out internationally as more liberal in terms of not ordering a complete lockdown of society. Sweden kept its primary schools, daycare centers and industries largely open. The government financially supported furloughed workers and increased its support to regional and local governments delivering healthcare and elderly care. However, the death toll in Sweden which passed 4000 by late May 2…
Bringing political science back into public administration research
The paper critically reviews the consequences of a bifurcation of Political Science and Public Administration. This divorce of two closely related academic fields has removed political explanations to key developments in the public service from Public Administration research and thus it tends to provide a partial view of the reality that it seeks to capture. There are several developments underway in the public sector, which underscore the politi…
Exploring the Strategic Region: Rationality, Context, and Institutional Collective Action
The article elaborates the concept of strategic regions which refers to bottom-up processes of inter-local cooperation. In a larger number of countries strategic regions are viewed as an attractive strategy to assist local governments in their pursuit or managing increasing costs in service delivery. In this article we first critically inspect rational choice-based models of interlocal cooperation and point out a couple of issues where they can b…
Thematic Review: Reinventing governance, reinventing democracy
Public service systems are transforming into market-like organisations of service delivery and in many countries there is experimentation with user boards, customer choice, and stakeholderism. Meanwhile, democratic governance looks surprisingly much like the way it did 25 or 50 years ago. This article reviews the transformation of governance from the vantage point of democratic values. The basic argument of the article is that western democracies…
A typology of populism: Understanding the Different Forms of Populism and Their Implications
Populism has become one of the most commonly used concepts in contemporary political science, albeit one which is often contested. Most of the discussion of populism, however, has focused on elections and political party systems. We argue that populist politics can be seen in a number of other dimensions of governance. We develop a typology of populist practices that appear in both democratic and non-democratic political systems, and discuss thei…
The shirking bureaucrat: A Theory in Search of Evidence
The article addresses the issue of public sector work motivation, particular the notion of bureaucratic ‘shirking’. Although a popular theoretical model among public choice scholars of public administration, the ‘shirking’ argument has not been empirically supported. The article compares two organisational models of ensuring public servants’ compliance; a contract regime which is common in public-interest-based, Anglo American countries, and a tr…
Politicisation of the public service during democratic backsliding: Alternative perspectives
This Research Note explores the issue of politicisation of the public service against the backdrop of the emergence of populism . A common feature of populist governments is a lack of trust in the civil service and its willingness to implement the populist political project. An important consequence of marginalising the civil service and its expertise in policy making is detrimental to policymaking. Also, increasing politicisation, that is replac…
From a club to a bureaucracy: JAA, Easa, and European aviation regulation
Theories of institutionalization tend to focus on organizational factors to understand an institution's development. This paper argues that institutionalization is just as much a matter of environmental compliance and tolerance with the emerging institution as it is a matter of intra-organizational development. The paper reports on a study of the transfer of regulatory authority of European aviation from the Joint Aviation Authority to the EU age…
Partnership or Privatisation? The political economy of local economic restructuring
The restructuring of local economies in the face of declining traditional industries is a major problem confronting all advanced western societies. This article contrasts the experience of two countries with very different traditions of political management of their national economies, namely the UK and Sweden. The authors argue that whilst there are important divergencies in macro political and economic objectives, there is an interesting conver…
The Nordic governments' responses to the Covid‐19 pandemic: A comparative study of variation in governance arrangements and regulatory instruments
Government responses to the Covid‐19 pandemic in the Nordic states—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—exhibit similarities and differences. This article investigates the extent to which crisis policymaking diverges from normal policymaking within the Nordic countries and whether variations between the countries are associated with the role of expertise and the level of politicization. Government responses are analyzed in terms of gover…
Multilevel governance as a strategy to build capacity in cities: Evidence from Sweden
Multilevel governance has opened up important new transnational spaces for cities in their pursuit of policy learning and knowledge building. Knowledge and expertise as elements of urban capacity building are becoming more important as cities are now expected to address increasingly complex issues. Drawing on a case study of the policy internationalization of the city of Gothenburg in Sweden, the article argues that joining international projects…
Legitimacy, Institutional Change, and the Politics of Public Administration in Sweden
Public administration in Sweden has been the chief vehicle for the rapid postwar development toward an extensive welfare state. However, during the 1980s, as a result of increasing criticism about inertia and bureaucratization, several major reforms were initiated to "renew" the public sector. These reforms included a wide range of different measures, including deregulation, privatization, and "liberalization" experiments at the local level. This…
Citizens Versus the New Public Manager: The Problem of Mutual Empowerment
Many contemporary reforms of the public sector advocate empowerment as a solution for many of the problems of governing. The difficulty arises when different groups—clients, lower-level officials, senior officials, and local communities—are all the subject of empowerment. Attempts to enhance the power of all these players in the policy process is argued to create the probability of political conflict, and this is demonstrated with a set of exampl…
Exit and Voice in Local Government Reconsidered: A ‘Choice Revolution’
Market‐based public management reform has introduced customer choice among competing providers of public services. Choice entails exit, an option which Albert Hirschman famously reserved for the market, while voice is the key mode of communication in political life. Based on elite and mass surveys, the article studies how exit is perceived by citizens and local political and administrative leaders in Norway and Sweden, and how the two strategic o…
Dismantling Democratic States
Dismantling Democratic States. By Ezra Suleiman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 368p. $39.50. Market-driven administrative reform has been the leitmotif of profound, perhaps even unprecedented, public sector reform across the Western world for the past decade or so. It is indicative that even in Sweden (the place of writing), a country that has been fairly slow in adopting this model of administrative reform, authorities such as the…
Three men run aground: A note on the rejoinder by Reif, Niedermayer and Schmitt
Attitudes and behaviour of party activists: A critical examination of recent research on party activists and ‘Middle‐Level Elites
During the last four years a research project has studied the ‘Middle‐Level Elites’ of sixty European political parties. Like most previous studies in this area the main objective of the project was strictly party activists’ attitudes; no attention was paid to their actual behaviour in the party organisation. Other studies of recent date indicate however that party activists, despite their often more radical or extreme stands on many issues, ofte…
Partnership or Privatisation? The political economy of local economic restructuring
The restructuring of local economies in the face of declining traditional industries is a major problem confronting all advanced western societies. This article contrasts the experience of two countries with very different traditions of political management of their national economies, namely the UK and Sweden. The authors argue that whilst there are important divergencies in macro political and economic objectives, there is an interesting conver…
Central state, local government, and the market: Industrial policy and structural change in Japan and Sweden
During the late 1970s and 1980s, Sweden and Japan both experienced a decentralization of industrial policy decision‐making and implementation. This article analyses the theoretical and empirical relationships between state and local industrial policies during processes of structural change and also how structural change affects regionally targeted policies. It is argued that although increasing emphasis on local mobilization and autonomy on indus…
Organized Capital and Local Politics: Local Business Organizations, Public-Private Committees, and Local Government in Sweden
Many analyses of urban political economy tend to overlook the significance of local business organizations and public-private committees in the urban political process. This article analyzes local business organizations and joint committees in Swedish municipalities. Political stability seems more important than ideological orientation of the local political elite for the creation of joint committees. Business influence on local politics is conti…
The membership of political parties in European democracies, 1960‐1990
Sweden
Sweden
Legitimacy, Institutional Change, and the Politics of Public Administration in Sweden
Public administration in Sweden has been the chief vehicle for the rapid postwar development toward an extensive welfare state. However, during the 1980s, as a result of increasing criticism about inertia and bureaucratization, several major reforms were initiated to "renew" the public sector. These reforms included a wide range of different measures, including deregulation, privatization, and "liberalization" experiments at the local level. This…
Sweden
The Marketization of the State: Citizens, Consumers, and the Emergence of the Public Market
Policy diffused, policy confused? The politics of regional industrial development in Sweden
La réforme administrative en Suède: Vers un déclin du contrôle politique de l’administration
Administrative Reform in Sweden : The Decline of Executive Capacity ? In a country like Sweden, which possesses the largest public sector in the Western world and which is often referred to as the model of the welfare State, administrative reform takes on a very particular significance. The renovation of the public sector took place during two successive periods : from 1982 to 1988, and from 1988 to 1995. This modernization policy culminated in a…
Sweden
Sweden
The Dynamics of Abstract and Manifest Institutional Change: Miti and the Japanese “Economic Miracle” Reconsidered
Modern institutional theory specifies two different aspects of institutions. The first aspect—and by far the predominant perspective—sees institutions as recurrent patterns of behavior, values, norms and practices which guide social and political behavior. The second aspect refers to the manifest institutional systems of the state. These two sides of institutions are supposed to be mutually reinforcing. Thus, institutions are “embedded” in overar…
Sweden
Sweden
Dépolitisée, repolitisée ou simplement politique ? La bureaucratie suédoise
Depoliticised, Repoliticised or Simply Political ? The Case of Sweden. It is hard to measure the degree of politicisation of the Swedish civil service. On the one hand, like any civil service, it is, due to its very role in society, political. On the other hand, the existence of political tendencies in civil servants in no way constitutes proof of politicisation one way or another to be measured from an individual and institutional point of view.…
The politics of currency crises in Sweden: Policy choice in a globalised economy
In the two‐pronged debate on ‘globalising markets’ the ‘society‐centered’ perspective claims nation‐states are losing economic control whereas the ‘state‐centred’ perspective holds that ‘business as usual’ is possible. Both views are oversimplified. Looking at Sweden's 1992 currency crisis, we suggest that studies over time provide insights about the significance of political craftsmanship. We argue that market influence on domestic policy making…
Governance Without Government? Rethinking Public Administration
The concept of governance has come to be used more commonly in the discussion of public administration, but the meaning of the term is not always clear. There is a growing body of European literature that can be characterized as "governance without government," stressing as it does the importance of networks, partnerships, and markets (especially international markets). This body of literature can be related to the new public management; yet it h…
Institutions and Time: Problems of Conceptualization and Explanation
The new institutionalism in the social sciences has returned questions of the role of institutions to a central position in the social sciences. As important as this has been, it has also helped disclose a number of inherent problems in institutional theory. The structure-agency problem—how to relate change to presumably stable structures—is particularly significant in the theory. This article discusses a variety of approaches to new institutiona…
The Welfare State Managers: Senior Civil Servants in Sweden
The first part of this chapter discusses retrenchment, recent institutional changes, and senior civil servants in Sweden; it attributes the recent changes in the senior civil service to the budgetary crisis of the state and the emergence of a less interventionalist control regime, in which the heyday of state‐driven economic and social change has gone. The main source of uncertainty now concerns the final destination of the rapid changes in many …
Models of Urban Governance: The Institutional Dimension of Urban Politics
Local governments in Western Europe have become increasingly involved in network building with the local business community. The author suggests that governance processes are not value neutral but reflect and sustain political values beyond partisan conflict. Comparing managerial, corporatist, progrowth, and welfare governance models of urban governance, the author argues that nation-state factors play an important role in shaping urban governanc…
Sweden
Political science (87 works) · Law (64 works) · Politics (57 works) · Economics (53 works) · Sociology (50 works) · Public Administration (48 works) · Law (46 works) · Political economy (34 works) · Public Administration (34 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (32 works)