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Aporien des Rechts
(2021)
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.
In 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.
Creativity is a crucial part of policy capacity in governments. Existing studies on creative behavior in the public sector assess employees' openness to new ideas and creative solutions, and they confirm the relevance of organizational and individual determinants for pro-creativity attitudes. Yet we lack systemic evidence on the explicit level of work-related creativity among policy officials in government organizations. At the same time, novel technologies and particularly social networking services change the working environment of policy officials radically, alter organizational features, and may also yield crucial individual effects. Our study analyses “policy creativity” of policy officials in three European governments. We demonstrate the importance of organizational and individual features, including the stress triggered by using social networking services. Our study captures officials' creativity explicitly and adds to debates on creativity and innovation in the public sector as well as the micro-level foundations of the digital transformation in the public sector.
Worldwide, governments have introduced novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) for policy formulation and service delivery, radically changing the working environment of government employees. Following the debate on work stress and particularly on technostress, we argue that the use of ICTs triggers “digital overload” that decreases government employees’ job satisfaction via inhibiting their job autonomy. Contrary to prior research, we consider job autonomy as a consequence rather than a determinant of digital overload, because ICT-use accelerates work routines and interruptions and eventually diminishes employees’ freedom to decide how to work. Based on novel survey data from government employees in Germany, Italy, and Norway, our structural equation modeling (SEM) confirms a significant negative effect of digital overload on job autonomy. More importantly, job autonomy partially mediates the negative relationship between digital overload and job satisfaction, pointing to the importance of studying the micro-foundations of ICT-use in the public sector.
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.
Almost twenty years after its recognition in international human rights law, the human right to water continues to spark discussions about its scope and meaning. This article revisits the evolution and contestation of the right's first international legal framework, General Comment No. 15 from the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The analysis highlights the contestation of economic and social rights as a universal phenomenon at multiple levels, but argues that these meaning-making practices can support their validation and recognition.
Despite new challenges like climate change and digitalization, global and regional organizations recently went through turbulent times due to a lack of support from several of their member states. Next to this crisis of multilateralism, the COVID-19 pandemic now seems to question the added value of international organizations for addressing global governance issues more specifically. This article analyses this double challenge that several organizations are facing and compares their ways of managing the crisis by looking at their institutional and political context, their governance structure, and their behaviour during the pandemic until June 2020. More specifically, it will explain the different and fragmented responses of the World Health Organization, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank. With the aim of understanding the old and new problems that these international organizations are trying to solve, this article argues that the level of autonomy vis-a-vis the member states is crucial for understanding the politics of crisis management. <br /> Points for practitioners <br /> As intergovernmental bodies, international organizations require authorization by their member states. Since they also need funding for their operations, different degrees of autonomy also matter for reacting to emerging challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential for international organizations is limited, though through proactive and bold initiatives, they can seize the opportunity of the crisis and partly overcome institutional and political constraints.
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.
Accountability can be conceptualized as institutionalized mechanisms obliging actors to explain their conduct to different forums, which can pose questions and impose sanctions. This article analyses different crises' in immigration policies in Norway, Denmark and Germany along a descriptive framework of five different accountability types: political, administrative, legal, professional and social accountability. The exchanges of information, debate and their consequences between an actor and a forum are crucial to understanding how political-administrative action is carried out in critical situations. First, accountability dynamics emphasize conventional norms and values regarding policy change and, second, formal political responsibility does not necessarily lead to political consequences such as minister resignations in cases of misbehaviour. Consequences strongly depend on how accountability dynamics take place.