The High Authority, later the European Commission, was indeed an organisational innovation. Unlike international governmental organisations, it should from its very inception be able to act independently of national governments. Its autonomy was to be justified by its role as a promoter of the...

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...

The relationship between the member states and the Commission is at the heart of the EU's institutional structure and at the centre of debates about the European Union. In the 1990s, the new institutionalism and the multi-level governance approach emphasised the limitations of state power in EU...

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...

This article highlights how the study of public administration is brought back into the study of European integration and European Union (EU) governance. The public administration turn in integration research has brought generic insights into the broader field of public administration but has...

The cabinets of the European Commission are seen to play a crucial role in the policy-making process. So far, however, they have in many respects remained ‘black boxes’. In this paper we ‘unpack’ the demographic composition in terms of nationality of the three latest commissions’...