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...

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...

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...

This article investigates how the European Social Fund (ESF) is being employed to translate Lisbon/Europe 2020 goals on employment into domestic agendas. The emphasis is not only on how European priorities are taken into account by ESF national programming documents (talking the EU talk), but...

The European Commission (Commission) occupies a pivotal role as the key executive institution of the European Union (EU). Yet, the factual autonomy of the Commission remains largely unexplored, contributing to contradictory assessments of it. The ambition of this study is to reassess the...

The EU is frequently understood as a special kind of governance system characterized by its strong degree of interpenetration of different levels of government and a plethora of interactions between EU institutions, administrations from national and subnational levels, as well as organized...

The paper starts by discussing what I think most students of government hold to be the most characteristic features of development over the last couple of decades; namely ‘agencification’ and fragmentation of national governments. Interestingly, when dealing with the problems such a...