The paper questions the fashionable ideas, that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable and non-viable form of administration, and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards market- or network organization. In contrast, the paper argues that...

Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years and is possibly experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and...

How can students of the European Union get from describing recent advances, to speculating about what are possible new directions and research agendas? How promising are terms such as “governance” and “the new governance” for improving the understanding how the Union is overned and...

To sketch an institutional approach, this paper elaborates ideas presented over 20 years ago in The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life (March and Olsen 1984). Institutionalism, as that term is used here, connotes a general approach to the study of political...

Many students of public administration have claimed, as rationale for the field, that the Prince, the President, the Legislator or the Ruling Class needs help. In contrast, John Gaus argued that it is the citizens who need help. From the latter perspective, the questions become, under what...

Over the last three decades many public sector reforms have aimed at giving administrative agencies and non-majoritarian institutions more autonomy from majority-based institutions and common sets of rules. The detachment-from-politics trend has implications for the public sector’s core...

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...

Nasjonale administrasjoner, eller mer korrekt, deler av nasjonale administrasjoner, har i noen grad også blitt deler av hva vi kan kalle en felles EU-administrasjon. Dette synes å henge sammen med to institusjonelle utviklingstrekk: På det europeiske nivået er det konsolideringen av...

Nasjonale administrasjoner, eller mer korrekt, deler av nasjonale administrasjoner, har i noen grad også blitt deler av hva vi kan kalle en felles EU-administrasjon. Dette synes å henge sammen med to institusjonelle utviklingstrekk: På det europeiske nivået er det konsolideringen av...

The jury is still out with respect to whether EU-level agencies act primarily as tools of national governments or not, although parts of the literature as well as the legal framework of EU agencies seem to favour the former interpretation. We argue that EU agencies which might be able to act...