How national regulatory agencies are integrated within multi-level European governance

The last few decades have seen a dramatic increase in both the number of national regulatory agencies operating across Europe and the number of European agencies operating under the framework of the EU. But how do these two groups of agencies interact? Drawing on a new study, Jacint Jordana and Kutsal Yesilkagit demonstrate how national regulatory agencies and European agencies have become entangled within multi-level European governance

Tussen Brussel en de Polder De Europeanisering van Politiek en Bestuur in Nederland

Session 1: Governance in the European Unio

The Impact of European Legislation on National Legislation in the Netherlands

Session 1: Governance in the European Unio

The New Eurocrats

Policies in the EU are largely made by national civil servants who prepare and implement decisions in Brussels as well as at home. Despite their important role, these national civil servants form a relatively hidden world that has received little attention from both the media and academics. This volume considers a wide variety of sources and research methods to answer such questions as: how many civil servants are actually involved in EU-related activities? What do these civil servants do when they engage with the EU? And how do they negotiate their dual roles? The New Eurocrats offers unique and invaluable insights into these civil servants and their working practices-and uncovers some secrets in the world of EU governance along the way

The Guardian State : strengthening the public service against democratic backsliding

Published online: 10 March 2024Liberal 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 guardianship as the key norm within the civil service fortifies democratic institutions against backsliding. The principle of neutrality alone cannot ensure that only liberal citizens come to power. Structural measures at the individual and organizational levels are essential to fortify the foundations of the Guardian State and protect liberal democracy against evolving threats. Proactive efforts are necessary to defend and strengthen the public service to ensure the long-term viability of democratic governance. The Guardian State places the bureaucracy in a key role in preserving the core principles of democracy

Kutsal Yesilkagit's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

Entangled agencies and embedded preferences: National Regulatory Agencies in multi-level European governance

The emergence of trans-governmental policy regimes in Europe has fundamentally changed the role of National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs). Here we move away from the idea that there is a meaningful divide between the domestic and the European levels of governance and suggest that a different logic has emerged in recent decades, combining multiple chains of delegation and innovative coordination schemes. NRAs have come to occupy a ‘broker’ or intermediary position between domestic and European polities, that is no longer adequately described by the prevailing, mainly dyadic models of bureaucratic autonomy conceived just for national states. In this paper, we build the concept of entangled agencies to make sense of the linkages between NRAs and European Agencies (EAs) and provide some preliminary empirical evidence to show how they effectively articulate various levels of government, presenting empirical findings on the connections that ties NRAs representatives with EAs management boards

What's in a name? The politics of name changes inside bureaucracy

International audienceIn this article, we examine the effects of political change on name changes of units within central government ministries. We expect that changes regarding the policy position of a government will cause changes in the names of ministerial units. To this end we formulate hypotheses combining the politics of structural choice and theories of portfolio allocation to examine the effects of political changes at the cabinet level on the names of intra-ministerial units. We constructed a dataset containing more than 17,000 observations on name changes of ministerial units between 1980 and 2013 from the central governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and France. We regress a series of generalized estimating equations (GEE) with population averaging models for binary outcomes. Finding variations across the three political-bureaucratic systems, we overall report positive effects of governmental change and ideological positions on name changes within ministries

Political time in public bureaucracies: Explaining variation of structural duration in European governments

Structural duration conveys stability but also resilience in central government and is therefore a key issue in the debate on the structure and organization of government. This paper discusses three core variants of structural duration to study the explanatory relevance of politics. We compare these durations across ministerial units in four European democracies (Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Norway) from 1980 to 2013, totaling over 17,000 units. Our empirical analyses show that cabinets' ideological turnover and extremism are the most significant predictors of all variants of duration, whereas polarization in parliament as well as new prime ministers without office experience yield the predicted significant negative effects for most models. We discuss these findings and avenues for future research that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly

Government Capacity, Societal Trust or Party Preferences? What Accounts for the Variety of National Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Europe?

European states responded to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with a variety of public policy measures. Governments across the continent acted more or less swiftly to close down schools, restrict arrival into their countries and travel within their territories, ban public meetings, impose local and national lockdowns, declare states of emergency and pass other emergency measures. Importantly, both the mix of policy tools as well as the speed with which they were enacted differed significantly even within the member states of the European Union. In this article we ask what can account for this variation in policy responses, and we identify a number of factors related to institutions, general governance and specific health-sector related capacities, societal trust, government type, and party preferences as possible determinants. Using multivariate regression and survival analysis, we model the speed with which school closures, national lockdowns and states of emergency were announced. The models suggest a number of significant and often counterintuitive relationships: we find that more centralized countries with lower government effectiveness, freedom and societal trust, but with separate ministries of health and health ministers with medical background acted faster and more decisively. These results are important in light of the large positive effects early policy responses likely had on managing the impact of the pandemic