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The recent debate on administrative bodies in international organizations has brought forward multiple theoretical perspectives, analytical frameworks, and methodological approaches. Despite these efforts to advance knowledge on these actors, the research program on international public administrations (IPAs) has missed out on two important opportunities: reflection on scholarship in international relations (IR) and public administration and synergies between these disciplinary perspectives. Against this backdrop, the essay is a discussion of the literature on IPAs in IR and public administration. We found influence, authority, and autonomy of international bureaucracies have been widely addressed and helped to better understand the agency of such non-state actors in global policy-making. Less attention has been given to the crucial macro-level context of politics for administrative bodies, despite the importance in IR and public administration scholarship. We propose a focus on agency and politics as future avenues for a comprehensive, joint research agenda for international bureaucracies.
In recent years, governments have increased their efforts to strengthen the citizen-orientation in policy design. They have established temporary arenas as well as permanent units inside the machinery of government to integrate citizens into policy formulation, leading to a “laboratorization” of central government organizations. We argue that the evolution and role of these units herald new dynamics in the importance of organizational reputation for executive politics. These actors deviate from the classic palette of organizational units inside the machinery of government and thus require their own reputation vis-à-vis various audiences within and outside their parent organization. Based on a comparative case study of two of these units inside the German federal bureaucracy, we show how ambiguous expectations of their audiences challenge their organizational reputation. Both units resolve these tensions by balancing their weaker professional and procedural reputation with a stronger performative and moral reputation. We conclude that government units aiming to improve citizen orientation in policy design may benefit from engaging with citizens as their external audience to compensate for a weaker reputation in the eyes of their audiences inside the government organization. Points for practitioners: many governments have introduced novel means to strengthen citizen-centered policy design, which has led to an emergence of novel units inside central government that differ from traditional bureaucratic structures and procedures ; this study analyzes how these new units may build their organizational reputation vis-à-vis internal and external actors in government policymaking. ; we show that such units assert themselves primarily based on their performative and moral reputation.
The recently adopted German Online Access Act triggered the creation of digitalization labs for designing digital services, bringing together federal, state, and local authorities; end-users; and private-sector actors. These labs provide opportunities for boundary spanning due to organizational field and lab features. Our comparative case studies on three digitalization labs show variations in boundary spanning and reveal lab members de-coupling from their parent organizations to a varying extent. We have concluded labs offer boundary spanning that supports safeguarding the legitimacy of innovative policy designs but also raise concerns over public accountability.
Recent debates in international relations increasingly focus on bureaucratic apparatuses of international organizations and highlight their role, influence, and autonomy in global public policy. In this contribution we follow the recent call made by Moloney and Rosenbloom in this journal to make use of “public administrative theory and empirically based knowledge in analyzing the behavior of international and regional organizations” and offer a systematic analysis of the inner structures of these administrative bodies. Changes in these structures can reflect both the (re-)assignment of responsibilities, competencies, and expertise, but also the (re)allocation of resources, staff, and corresponding signalling of priorities. Based on organizational charts, we study structural changes within 46 international bureaucracies in the UN system. Tracing formal changes to all internal units over two decades, this contribution provides the first longitudinal assessment of structural change at the international level. We demonstrate that the inner structures of international bureaucracies in the UN system became more fragmented over time but also experienced considerable volatility with periods of structural growth and retrenchment. The analysis also suggests that IO's political features yield stronger explanatory power for explaining these structural changes than bureaucratic determinants. We conclude that the politics of structural change in international bureaucracies is a missing piece in the current debate on international public administrations that complements existing research perspectives by reiterating the importance of the political context of international bureaucracies as actors in global governance.
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 ministerialunits 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 futureresearch that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly.
The reorganization of governments is crucial for parties to express their policy preferences once they reach office. Yet these activities are not confined to the direct aftermath of general elections or to wide-ranging structural reforms. Instead, governments reorganize and adjust their machinery of government all the time. This paper aims to assess these structural choices with a particular focus at the core of the state, comparing four Western European democracies (Germany, France, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom) from 1980 to 2013. Our empirical analysis shows that stronger shifts in cabinets' ideological profiles in the short- and long-term as well as the units' proximity to political executives yield significant effects. In contrast, Conservative governments, commonly regarded as key promoters of reorganizing governments, are not significant for the likelihood of structural change. We discuss the effects of this politics of government reorganization for different research debates assessing the inner workings of governments.
This study follows the debate in comparative public administration research on the role of advisory arrangements in central governments. The aim of this study is to explain the mechanisms by which these actors gain their alleged role in government decision-making. Hence, it analyses advisory arrangements that are proactively involved in executive decision-making and may compete with the permanent bureaucracy by offering policy advice to political executives. The study argues that these advisory arrangements influence government policy-making by "institutional politics", i.e. by shaping the institutional underpinnings to govern or rather the "rules of the executive game" in order to strengthen their own position or that of their clients. The theoretical argument of this study follows the neo-institutionalist turn in organization theory and defines institutional politics as gradual institutionalization processes between institutions and organizational actors. It applies a broader definition of institutions as sets of regulative, normative and cognitive pillars. Following the "power-distributional approach" such gradual institutionalization processes are influenced by structure-oriented characteristics, i.e. the nature of the objects of institutional politics, in particular the freedom of interpretation in their application, as well as the distinct constraints of the institutional context. In addition, institutional politics are influenced by agency-oriented characteristics, i.e. the ambitions of actors to act as "would-be change agents". These two explanatory dimensions result in four ideal-typical mechanisms of institutional politics: layering, displacement, drift, and conversion, which correspond to four ideal-types of would-be change agents. The study examines the ambitions of advisory arrangements in institutional politics in an exploratory manner, the relevance of the institutional context is analyzed via expectation hypotheses on the effects of four institutional context features that are regarded as relevant in the scholarly debate: (1) the party composition of governments, (2) the structuring principles in cabinet, (3) the administrative tradition, and (4) the formal politicization of the ministerial bureaucracy. The study follows a "most similar systems design" and conducts qualitative case studies on the role of advisory arrangements at the center of German and British governments, i.e. the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Finance, for a longer period (1969/1970-2005). Three time periods are scrutinized per country; the British case studies examine the role of advisory arrangements at the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister's Office, and the Ministry of Finance under Prime Ministers Heath (1970-74), Thatcher (1979-87) and Blair (1997-2005). The German case studies study the role of advisory arrangements at the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Ministry of Finance during the Brandt government (1969-74), the Kohl government (1982-1987) and the Schröder government (1998-2005). For the empirical analysis, the results of a document analysis and the findings of 75 semi-structured expert interviews have been triangulated. The comparative analysis reveals different patterns of institutional politics. The German advisory arrangements engaged initially in displacement but turned soon towards layering and drift, i.e. after an initial displacement of the pre-existing institutional underpinnings to govern they laid increasingly new elements onto existing ones and took the non-deliberative decision to neglect the adaption of existing rules of the executive game towards changing environmental demands. The British advisory arrangements were mostly involved in displacement and conversion, despite occasional layering, i.e. they displaced the pre-existing institutional underpinnings to govern with new rules of the executive game and transformed and realigned them, sometimes also layering new elements onto pre-existing ones. The structure- and agency-oriented characteristics explain these patterns of institutional politics. First, the study shows that the institutional context limits the institutional politics in Germany and facilitates the institutional politics in the UK. Second, the freedom of interpreting the application of institutional targets is relevant and could be observed via the different ambitions of advisory arrangements across countries and over time, confirming, third, that the interests of such would-be change agents are likewise important to understand the patterns of institutional politics. The study concludes that the role of advisory arrangements in government policy-making rests not only upon their policy-related, party-political or media-advisory role for political executives, but especially upon their activities in institutional politics, resulting in distinct institutional constraints on all actors in government policy-making – including their own role in these processes.
Federal Administration
(2021)
The federal administration is significantly small (around 10 percent of all public employees). This speciality of the German administrative system is based on the division of responsibilities: the central (federal) level drafts and adopts most of the laws and public programmes, and the state level (together with the municipal level) implements them. The administration of the federal level comprises the ministries, subordinated agencies for special and selected operational tasks (e.g. the authorisation of drugs, information security and registration of refugees) in distinct administrative sectors (e.g. foreign service, armed forces and federal police). The capacity for preparing and monitoring government bills and statutory instruments is well developed. Moreover, the instruments and tools of coordination are exemplary compared with other countries, although the recent digital turn has been adopted less advanced than elsewhere.
In countries with long-standing agency traditions, the creation of new agencies rarely comes as a large-scale reform but rather as one structural choice of many possible, most notably a ministerial division. In order to make sense of these choices, the article discusses the role of political design-focusing on the role of political motivations, such as ideological turnover, replacement risks and ideological stands toward administrative efficiency-and organizational dynamics-focusing on the role of administrative legacies and existing organizational palettes. The article utilizes data on organizational creations in the Norwegian central state between 1947 and 2019, in order to explore how political design and organizational dynamics help us understand the creation of agencies relative to ministry divisions over time. We find that political motives matter a great deal for the structural choices made by consecutive Norwegian governments, but that structural path dependencies may also be at play.