Against the backdrop of decades of public sector reforms in Europe, this essay aims to make sense of the processes through which institutions, democratic government included, achieve and lose autonomy or primacy and why it is difficult to find a state of equilibrium between democratic government...

Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to undermine political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards the robustness of these findings. In this paper we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from...

The establishment of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in 1999 has led to the creation of a whole range of bureaucratic bodies in Brussels and the national capitals. These bodies support the crisis management operations of the European Union. This review article presents the state...

The more important governmental cooperation and bureaucratic involvement become in ESDP, the more pressing becomes the issue of democratic control of executive cooperation. This article starts from the argument that parliamentary involvement in decision-making is of central importance for...

This article presents the results of a single-case study done in order to probe a specific version of an information processing approach to the study of (public) organizations. The case used for this probe is the European Fundamental Rights Agency. The article demonstrates that the information...

This study is directly concerned with the articulation of strategic choice in the public sector. Despite the considerable amount of literature dealing with strategic management, there has been little empirical study to support theoretical constructs. The parameters of the model are derived from...

Research and a review of the related literature indicate that the United States defense industry has had a long history of unethical and illegal business practices. Recent polls find that most Americans believe that their nation's weapon acquisition system is one of the worst managed activities...

The desire to reform the European Commission is a recurrent theme on the agenda. Has the political failure to reach an appropriate restructuring of this institution a parallel in academic neglect of that institution? To answer this question the article looks into current research efforts on the...

In this paper we examine the transposition of European Union (EU) legislation in the twelve 'new' member states during the post-accession stage. To this end, we scrutinize the number of formal notice letters received by the new member states in the period from 2004 to 2007. Our analysis shows...

Altneuland: The European Constitutional Terrain It is in many respects a New Land - for the first time the Union is openly, officially using the word Constitution in its formal self-understanding. But this, in turn, places it, at least lexically, in the age old terrain of constitutionalism which...