Administrative Governance
The notion of 'administrative governance' is predicated on two different assumptions. The first concerns the influence that administrative actors exert on the content, scope and execution of policies formally decided upon by (democratically elected) 'political' actors. Quite naturally this assumption has fuelled normative worries about the democratic quality of politics. The basic issues of public policies should be decided upon by the democratically chosen representatives of the citizens, not by non-elected, career civil servants.
The second assumption, already indicated by the use of the expression 'governance', involves the recognition that the traditional approach to the analysis of bureaucratic influence and (informal) power is of limited use when studying a supra-national polity like the EU or an international regime like the International Atomic Energy Agency. Traditional analyses of bureaucracy based government typically assumed national administrations to represent a mono-centric structure, i.e. a hierarchy operated through a topmost authority, albeit that this ultimate authority may be exerted by an individual as well as by a group or 'college'. In contrast, supra- and international policy-making typically has a 'multilevel' and 'polycentric' character. It involves the cooperation between different political and administrative levels, and between public as well as private actors ('policy networks'), without having recourse to a definite, 'highest' centre of political power. The European Commission, for example, has to share implementing authority with the administrations of the Member States, while EU law-making depends more and more on the tripartite cooperation between European Commission, European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. Under such conditions the opportunities and mechanisms of 'bureaucratic politics' differ in important respects from those offered by the typical European domestic administrations, which eventually depend on one centre, i.e. the president or the cabinet.
Of course, already from a historical perspective it may be doubted whether modern states have ever lived up to the model of a strict, unified hierarchy. As Michael Mann once put it, the right hand of the state does often not know what the left hand is doing. If only for reasons of a systematic comparison between the bureaucratic operations of supra- and international systems of decision making on the one hand and the functioning of administrations within national polities on the other, the research program will therefore pay attention to the different historic trajectories that led to the diverse administrative structures of particular 19th and 20th century nation states and their transnational relations.
In sum, the 'Administrative Governance'-project aims to provide a better understanding of the role and influence of bureaucracy in multi-layered systems of decision making by developing a coherent and interdisciplinary research programme organised around a series of key questions. While the EU polity, being one of the most advanced examples of multi-level governance, will be a central concern, the research program has a broader focus as it will include also the role of bureaucracies in the history of modern nation states and in the emerging system of global governance.
Driven by broad empirical interests as well as by theoretical and normative concerns the research project Administrative Governance provides a framework for more focused and circumscribed research projects like, amongst others, PhD.-projects. The projects have been grouped into 3 sections, respectively focusing on administrative influence and the role of information; administrative governance and the politics of information; administrative governance in a historical perspective.
Section I - Administrative Influence and the Role of Information
1) The Role of Administrative Players within the European Parliament
2) Public Entrepreneurs in the EU
3) Informational Asymmetry and Administrative Governance in European Migration Management: Coordinating 'Safe Country' Positions
4) The Organisation of Accountability: Peer Reviews in Global Organisations
5) Permanent Representations as a Source of Influence
Section II - The Politics of Informing the EU
6) Regulation by Information: The role of Information and Expertise in EU Agencies
7) The Politics of Informing the EU: The Case of Eurostat
8) Politics of Information in the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)
Section III - Administrative Governance in a Historical Perspective
9) The Reform of National Administrations in Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands, 1919-1999
10) The Language of Bureaucracy from the 19th Century to the Present Day
11) Internationalism and the transfer of administrative knowledge, 1840-1919
In addition to the above-mentioned projects, it is also possible to propose alternative research proposals related to the Administrative Governance research programme.