Researching European Union Agencies: What Have We Learnt (and Where Do We Go from Here)?

This review article, with a clear political science and public administration bias, takes stock of the existing literature on EU agencies and suggests a future research agenda. The article reviews studies on EU agencies' organization, tasks, proliferation and location in the political-administrative space. Whether the advent of EU agencies tends to underpin a basically intergovernmental, transnational or supranational order has potentially huge consequences for the distribution of power across levels of government, for the degree of policy uniformity and pooling of administrative resources across countries, for the role of genuinely European perspectives in the policy process, and for accou…

Agencification and location: Does agency site matter?

Published version of an article published in Public Organization Review, 11(2), 97-108. Also available from the publisher at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11115-010-0113-8 Two decades of New Public Management have placed agencifiction high on the agenda of administrative policy-makers. However, agencification (and de-agencification) has been one of the enduring themes of public administration. Agencies organized at arm's length from ministerial departments have fairly often been located outside of the capital or political centre. Although practitioners tend to assign some weight to central versus peripheral location as regards political-administrative behavior, this relationship has been almos…

Agencification of the European Union Administration: Connecting the Dots

This review paper, with a clear political science and public administration bias, takes stock of the existing literature on EU agencies and suggests a future research agenda in this area. We review studies on EU agencies’ organization, tasks, proliferation and location in the political-administrative space. Whether the advent of EU agencies tends to underpin a basically intergovernmental, transnational or supranational order is a major topic with potentially huge consequences for the distribution of power across levels of government, for the degree of policy uniformity and pooling of administrative resources across countries, for the role of genuinely European perspectives in the policy pro…

The many faces of EU committee governance

Committees linking national administrations and the EU level play a crucial role at all stages of the EU policy process. The literature tends to portray this group system as a coherent mass, characterised by expert-oriented ‘deliberative supranationalism’, a term developed through studies of comitology (implementation) committees. This article builds on survey data on 218 national officials in 14 Member States who have attended EU committee meetings. We show that these groups do indeed exhibit important common features. Firstly, expert knowledge rather than country size plays a pivotal role in the decision making process. Secondly, across types of committee, participants evoke multiple alle…

NATIONAL AGENCIES IN THE EUROPEAN ADMINISTRATIVE SPACE: GOVERNMENT DRIVEN, COMMISSION DRIVEN OR NETWORKED?

Submitted version of an article published in the journal: Public Administration. Published version available at Wiley InterScience: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2009.01779.x In terms of national agencies in the European administrative space, case studies indicate that national governments may be partly split so that national (regulatory) agencies operate in a 'double-hatted' manner when practising EU legislation, serving both ministerial departments and the European Commission. Applying large-N questionnaire data, this article follows up these studies by investigating how important various institutions are with respect to influencing national agencies when they are practising EU le…

People Who Run the European Parliament: Staff Demography and Its Implications

AbstractWith few exceptions, parliament administrations, including secretariat officials and party group staff, have been relatively unexplored. However, a small, but growing, literature on the administration of the European Parliament (EP) indicates that officials play a role in the policy process that goes beyond technical and procedural questions. On this background, this article therefore aims at, first, finding out who the people working in the EP secretariat and group secretariats are, and, second, investigating whether it matters who these people are. Based on an online survey, we unveil the bureaucrats’ nationality, gender, educational background and former and future career (plans)…

Political Leadership and Bureaucratic Autonomy: Effects of Agencification

Submitted version of an article published in the journal: Governance Published version available from Wiley-Blackwell: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0491.2009.01458.x Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to reduce political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards the robustness of these findings. In this article we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from executive politicians than their counterparts within ministerial (cabinet-level) departments. This finding holds when we control for variation in tasks, the political salience of issue areas and officials’ rank. Simultaneously we observe t…

Agencification

Presentation on department page: http://www.uia.no/no/portaler/om_universitetet/oekonomi_og_samfunnsvitenskap/statsvitenskap_og_ledelsesfag/ forskning_isl/isl_working_papers_series One persistent theme in public administration is whether a government portfolio should be organized as an integrated ministry or as a dual organization composed of a ministerial department and one or several semi-detached agencies. ‘Agencification’ has, partly due to the New Public Management (NPM) wave, been high on the agenda of administrative policy-makers for two decades. Two decades of NPM reforms have made the agencification phenomenon highly topical and this also attracted considerable scholarly attention.…

Europas politiske orden i endring

NASJONAL ADMINISTRATIV SUVERENITET – MYTE ELLER REALITET?

Presentation on department page: http://www.uia.no/no/portaler/om_universitetet/oekonomi_og_samfunnsvitenskap/statsvitenskap_og_ledelsesfag/ forskning_isl/isl_working_papers_series Til tross for EUs overnasjonale karakter på de fleste politikkområder, har det vært vanlig å si at også medlemsstatene nyter en form for administrativ suverenitet. Med dette menes at selv om EUs politikk (for eksempel i form av lover) kommer i stand på en overnasjonal måte, har det likevel i hovedsak vært opp til nasjonale myndigheter å stå for den pålagte gjennomføringen. Ved at EUs lover i stor grad har vært gitt i form av direktiver, kan dette ha gitt nasjonale myndigheter betydelig rom for tilpasning i iverks…