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Although German bureaucracy is typically categorised as Weberian, a clear distinction between politics and administration has never been a defining characteristic of the German political-administrative system. Many close interrelations and interactions between elected politicians and appointed civil servants can be observed at all levels of administration. Higher-ranking civil servants in Germany are used to and generally appreciate the functional politicisation of their jobs, that is their close involvement in all stages of the policy process, from policy formation, goal definition, negotiation within and outside government to the implementation and evaluation of policies. For top positions, therefore, a class of ‘political civil servants’ is a special feature of the German system, and obtaining ‘political craft’ has become an important part of the learning and job experience of higher-ranking civil servants.
This open access book presents a topical, comprehensive and differentiated analysis of Germany’s public administration and reforms. It provides an overview on key elements of German public administration at the federal, Länder and local levels of government as well as on current reform activities of the public sector. It examines the key institutional features of German public administration; the changing relationships between public administration, society and the private sector; the administrative reforms at different levels of the federal system and numerous sectors; and new challenges and modernization approaches like digitalization, Open Government and Better Regulation. Each chapter offers a combination of descriptive information and problem-oriented analysis, presenting key topical issues in Germany which are relevant to an international readership.
This article contributes to the politics of policy‐making in executive government. It introduces the analytical distinction between generalists and specialists as antagonistic players in executive politics and develops the claim that policy specialists are in a structurally advantaged position to succeed in executive politics and to fend off attempts by generalists to influence policy choices through cross‐cutting reform measures. Contrary to traditional textbook public administration, we explain the views of generalists and specialists not through their training but their positions within an organization. We combine established approaches from public policy and organization theory to substantiate this claim and to define the dilemma that generalists face when developing government‐wide reform policies (‘meta‐policies’) as well as strategies to address this problem. The article suggests that the conceptual distinction between generalists and specialists allows for a more precise analysis of the challenges for policy‐making across government organizations than established approaches.
In 2013, large floods affected Germany heavily. The natural disaster transcended jurisdictional and organisational boundaries, necessitating a coordinative effort by disaster relief forces and their administrative and political leadership. In the aftermath, politicians and experts praised the improvement of the German system of crisis management, also in direct comparison with the response to the last German “flood of the century” of 2002. This chapter takes a public policy and organisational perspective to analyse the German disaster relief governance throughout all four crisis management phases. By highlighting the central features of the German governance arrangements and the main organisational changes implemented in reaction to the previous flood in 2002, we find that Whole-of-Government approaches are increasingly used by the federal and Länder government.
This chapter outlines the strategy of the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) and reflects on some of its key strengths, and how these may equip the European community of scholars and practitioners of public administration (PA) to contribute to the development of the field. The chapter reviews the key trait of the EGPA organisational model: the Permanent Study Groups, which are communities of scholars centred on the key areas of the administrative sciences in Europe. It also discusses the partnerships that EGPA has developed with key institutions in Europe and beyond, and highlights the significance of the EGPA policy papers on European governance. Finally, it discusses the strategic, forward-looking project European Perspectives on Public Administration, which aims to reflect on the future of the research and teaching of public administration.
The article explores how recent changes in the governance of employment services in three European countries (Denmark, Germany and Norway) have influenced accountability relationships. The overall assumption in the growing literature about accountability is that the number of actors involved in accountability arrangements is rising, that accountability relationships are becoming more numerous and complex, and that these changes may lead to contradictory accountability relationships, and finally to ‘multi accountability disorder’. The article tries to explore these assumptions by analysing the different actors involved and the information requested in the new governance arrangements in all three countries. It concludes that the considerable changes in organizational arrangements and more managerial information demanded and provided have led to more shared forms of accountability. Nevertheless, a clear development towards less political or administrative accountability could not be observed.
Emmanuel Kant asked three important questions which will always be with us: What can we know? What should we do? What may we hope for? These three key existentialist questions are, of course, also relevant for a reflection on the future of Public Administration: What can we know, as researchers in the field of Public Administration, about our object of public administration? What should we do as researchers and teachers to make sure we remain part of a solution and to guarantee that we are ahead of reality and its future problems? What kind of improvement (or not) may we hope for a public sector in an increasingly complex society? This chapter tries to explore some possible answers to these three important questions for our field of Public Administration. The background is our common project about ‘European Perspectives for Public Administration’ (EPPA), which we hope to establish as a continuous dialogue and discourse in the context of European Public Administration and the ‘European Group for Public Administration’ (EGPA).
Accountability is one of the most widely discussed concepts of public administration research and teaching in the last decade. But why is this case? Obviously accountability is, like its counterpart transparency, a “magic concept”, and an indispensable part of the prominent and omnipresent discourse on “good governance” as well as a significant element in debates about public sector reform. The same holds true for performance, which has been a magic and contested concept ever since New Public Management (NPM) entered the discourse about “modern” processes and structures of the public sector. But the third term in the title of this paper, legitimacy, even though it is one of the basic concepts of political science and democracy and is at the heart of Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy, has been surprisingly absent from current debates about the challenges of modern public administration, and for that sake also about the future of the welfare state. This chapter argues that different concepts of legitimacy lie at the heart of most debates about accountability and performance (input, output and throughput legitimacy), and that a better understanding of the relationships between accountability, performance and legitimacy can clarify some of the puzzles of contemporary research.