The Palgrave Handbook of the European Administrative System

M. Bauer, J. Trondal, M. Bauer, J. Trondal

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137339881
• eBook ISBN: 9781137339898
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on research from the administrative sciences and using organizational, institutional and decision-making theories, this volume examines the emerging bureaucratic framework of the EU and highlights that analyzing the patterns and dynamics of the EU's administrative capacities is essential to understand how it shapes European public policy.

1

The Administrative System of the European Union

Michael W. Bauer and Jarle Trondal

Introduction¹

This volume is a primer on the European Union (EU) administrative system. It offers a wide-ranging analysis, notably on how EU administrative capacities relate to pre-existing institutional constellations at global, national, and subnational levels of government, and contribute to a system transformation of existing (largely nation-state) administrative orders. The intellectual foundations of the endeavor lie in the fields of administrative sciences, organizational and institutional theories, and theories of decision-making and the policy-making process. This introductory chapter aims to set the stage regarding the core aims of the volume, scholarly relevance, and a research agenda. It attempts to develop a perspective of public administration as the core characteristics and elements of the EU’s emerging political system. We argue that analyzing the patterns and dynamics of the administrative capacities of the EU is essential in understanding how the EU shapes European public policy. Administrative capacities are thus not analyzed in isolation, but as structures that mobilize systematic bias in the production of public policy (Arellano-Gault et al., 2013, 154; Schattschneider, 1975).

This volume addresses a variety of research questions on institutional change and continuity, decision-making behavior and processes, and public policy making. Six broader research questions are placed center stage and are discussed and empirically illuminated throughout the individual chapters:

•To what extent, how, and under what conditions do administrative systems change and complement pre-existing public administration systems? More specifically, we ask to what extent, how, and under what conditions the emergent European public administration system challenges and complements crucial functions of pre-existing, that is national, public administration systems.

•How enduring are administrative systems? More specifically, we ask to what extent the characteristics, elements, and dynamics of an emergent European administrative system are fairly stable or subject to abrupt change. In short, how unsettled and emergent is the European administrative system?

•Do new administrative systems profoundly transform pre-existing administrative systems? More specifically, we ask if the rise of a genuine European public administration system represents a profound institutional transformation, or merely an adjustment of well-known principles and practices of administrative organization and patterns of public policy making.

•What are the principled implications of an emergent new European administrative system? More specifically, we ask how a European public administration system impacts on well-known processes of administrative control, accountability, coordination, implementation, and policy learning.

•How does the growth of administrative capacities equate with the principle of democratic governance? More specifically, we ask how a European public administration system may change public administration as an instrument of national democratic authority. How far and with what effects does policy making in a multilevel administrative system change the role and power of core executive institutions and correspondingly weaken parliamentary oversight?

•Finally, when does administrative capacity building equate to new polity formation? More specifically, we ask to what extent the rise of a European administrative system contributes to system transformation. Does the sum of administrative capacities – and their inter-relationships – aggregate to some kind of common administrative system? If so, this volume aims to unveil the characteristics, elements, and dynamics of such a system.

Our point of departure is the observation that the European integration project that has become the EU has transformed and keeps transforming itself and its member states. In more than 60 years of cooperation, a multilevel political and administrative system has emerged that is characterized by institutional innovation and imitation, and organizational fragmentation and integration, as well as institutional continuity and change. Of course, any political system tends to adjust – more or less effectively – to changing technical, socioeconomic, and cultural environments (Cerny, 2006; Thornton et al., 2012). However, the scope, scale, and intensity of change that has been evident in the EU make it a particularly interesting case to study.² Thus, the EU can be understood as a system that provides specific challenges and particular conditions to cope with or suffer from institutional change. Against this background, this chapter is concerned with what may be called the ‘administrative dimension’ of the emerging multilevel political system of the EU. Five concerns underpin the relevance of choosing such a focus.

A first reason for focusing on the administrative face of the EU relates to the fact that the EU is neither a republican democracy nor a fully-fledged state. Its supranational legal order is uniquely dense and sophisticated, but there is, for example, no common administrative law as we know it from nation-states. Other differences concern the fact that it is national legislators that largely transpose EU legislation, with national contributions basically financing the EU budget, and national public administrations and national courts practicing and supervising EU public policies. In other words, peculiarities of the division of tasks between national and supranational levels of government underscore some unique features of the EU administrative system. However, the separation of authority between levels of government appears more pronounced, that is its various levels are more independent from each other, than seems to be the case in any national federal system.

This manifest separation gives rise to a number of specific characteristics and challenges. For example, enforcement of EU policies is less determined by unified rules and procedures and thus tends to be much more precarious and also more costly than in national systems. Therefore, it is easy to see why joint convictions and values, and common operating procedures, become important in safeguarding a cohesive implementation in the various national constituencies. As it is the bureaucratic apparatuses at various levels which prepare policy solutions, organize the decision making, and conduct implementation, the concern arises that democratically unresponsive and anonymous bureaucrats de facto decide without proper political guidelines about issues that majorly affect national ways of life and the redistributive choices of European societies (Habermas, 2012).

A second and related concern about administrative power in the EU stems from the particular decision-making logic developed at supranational level. The standard legislative process in the EU requires a proposal from the Commission, a broad majority in the Council, and the approval of the European Parliament (Stie, 2013). The efficiency of that procedure has been praised. However, once the high consensual hurdle has been jumped, the very same consensual requirements prevent the subsequent adaptation of supranational legislation. Even if political preferences subsequently change, a coalition between the Commission and a small number of member states can relatively easily defend the status quo (Scharpf, 2006). In other words, EU legislation is much less reversible than national legislation; one effect of this is that the ‘custodians’ at supranational and national levels increasingly become central players because they ‘administer’ the status quo with the prevailing legislative stability playing into their hands (Ellinas and Suleiman, 2012). Moreover, in many EU policy areas (monetary policy, competition policy, or areas where the open method of coordination is applied) representative politicians tend to be cut out and special appointees are empowered instead – such as European judges and bureaucratic experts. It is evident that in view of these observations the conditions, structures, and forms of interaction under which public administration in the EU functions need to be thoroughly studied. ³

Thirdly, public administration as a subdiscipline needs to pay more attention to ongoing transformations of bureaucratic interaction in the EU. The administrative reality of the EU – perhaps with the exception of work concerning the European Commission – remains under-studied even though it has received increased academic attention in recent years (for example, Kassim et al., 2013). Public administration scholars thus still have only an imperfect and partial understanding of how the supranational administrations function, how bureaucratic interactions occur horizontally and vertically among various political layers, how administrative structures across levels are developing, how precisely supranational administrative actors cultivate and use resources, and how national bureaucratic structures and actors adapt to and exploit respective constellations. From an administrative science perspective, it is of great importance to come to grips with the contemporary bureaucratic reality and administrative change in the EU. Even more so since mapping and explaining administrative patterns and variations, be they structural or attitudinal, allow significant insights into a fluid multilevel political system, the constituents of which have been forged by the varied paths taken in the past and which have accompanied diverse national traditions, institutional arrangements, cultures, and styles. How such diversity is bound together and how it combines needs to be disentangled.

Fourthly, there is also a broader theoretical interest behind analyzing the patterns and dynamics of the EU administrative system. This more general theoretical interest is related to the challenge that the emerging EU administrative system poses for the discipline of public administration which has been largely locked in ‘national laboratories’. Theoretical lessons from social sciences are arguably affected by the empirical laboratories available to scholars. The domain of public administration may possibly gain new theoretical advances by challenging methodological nationalism. As new forms of political and administrative orders emerge, they need to be appropriately analyzed and interpreted in view of the changes they carry for executive politics and bureaucratic interaction. How public administration functions in a world characterized by the blurring of administrative boundaries, increasing interdependence, and decreasing capacities of national administrations to provide a common good is still far from well understood. The emerging public administration of the EU, in which such kinds of structural changes are arguably most advanced, appears the appropriate area for sharpening our analytical tools and for learning new theoretical lessons in public administration. Such an exercise also adds to the effort of bringing public organizations into greater focus in organizational sciences and thus building bridges between organizational studies and public administration (see Arellano-Gault et al., 2013, 152; Bozeman, 2013).

Fifthly, mapping and explaining changes in the EU administrative order must not, however, be seen as an end in itself. While recording and accurately describing administrative patterns and dynamics are of crucial value, the prime aim is to decode the consequences of administrative realities for public policy. Against this background, this chapter attempts to develop a perspective of public administration as a core dimension of the EU’s emerging political system. We argue that analyzing the patterns and dynamics of the administrative capacities of the EU is essential in understanding how the EU shapes European public policy.

The chapter is laid out as follows. The next section offers rationales for studying the EU as an administrative system. The third section reviews the existing literature and attempts to ‘order’ the various works into distinct scholarly approaches and agendas. Against the background of the analysis of the state of the art of scholarly thinking, we then consider the elements constituting the most specific characteristic of EU administration, fourth section. By combining approaches of multilevel governance and system theory, a ‘system perspective’ as an appropriate framework for studying EU administration is offered; the aim is not to prescribe a particular theory in order to analyze EU administration, but rather to outline a broad frame for analysis that may encourage the accumulation of knowledge from the case studies presented throughout this volume. The chapter closes with the skeleton of the research agenda in the fifth section and a brief outline of the structure of the volume in the sixth section.

Studying administrative systems

The significance of administrative systems, structures, and dynamics is often taken for granted during historical periods of stability. As envisaged already by Saint-Simon (1964, 35–38) in 1814, a necessary factor in building political order is the establishment of common institutions, including a permanent congress independent of national governments serving the common interest. During periods of crisis, however, existing political and administrative arrangements tend to be subject to debate, contestation, and demands for major reform. Periods of turbulence are sometimes also accompanied by calls for pre-existing political solutions; new problems may call for familiar answers. The financial crisis that hit Europe in 2008 illustrates that in order to understand administrative systems, we need to understand how formal organizations emerge, change, learn, and disappear. It is equally important to understand how organizations, and different modes of organizing, affect decision making, cooperation, and conflict as well as political outcomes.

However, studies of unsettled systems such as the EU have been – at least in this respect – much less attended to in scholarship. Since the classic administrative school of Luther Gulick (1937) and up to recent public administration and comparative government literature (Olsen, 2010), scholars have largely dealt with settled administrative systems. This volume aims to contribute to our understanding of the rise of the European administrative system as a ‘system in the making’ – regarding both its major causes and its consequences. The analytical point of departure is thus the European administrative system, and unfinished and evolutionary polity. Given the rise of an emergent administrative system in the EU, one scholarly challenge is thus to empirically recognize it. An even greater challenge, of course, is to explain it and to assess its likely consequences. This volume contributes to both challenges.

From a public administration perspective, questions of an emerging executive system in Europe are of increasing interest. The focal point of small- and large-scale changes to Europe’s inherent administrative systems is indeed the EU bureaucracy which supplies the EU with administrative capacity – basically making the EU able to act fairly independently of m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1. The Administrative System of the European Union
• Part I: Theoretical Perspectives
• Part II: EU’s Executive Administration
• Part III: EU’s Parliament Administration
• Part IV: EU’s ‘Intergovernmental’ Administration
• Part V: EU’s Court Administration
• Part VI: EU’s Subordinated Administration
• Part VII: Vertical and Horizontal Administrative Interaction
• Part VIII. Conclusions and Challenges
• Index