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...

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...

This section (1) presents three landmark articles that are part of a research agenda launched more than twenty years ago. Then, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life” invited a reappraisal of how political institutions could be conceptualized, to what degree...

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...

Is the European Research University going to be a historical parenthesis? The question has been raised, yet there is no agreed-upon answer, and this article aims at providing a framework for making sense of the current dynamics of the University. The key issue is: What kind of university 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...

It is a commonplace to argue that democracies require constitutional rules in order to function well; in particular, such rules facilitate conflict resolution and secure a civilized co-existence. Democratic governance signifies an ability to purposefully shape political and social life;...

While it is commonplace to argue that political institutions are a source of inertia and resistance to change and that the New Institutionalism is unable to explain change, this paper takes the opposite view. First, the problem of change is reformulated and it is observed that institutions have...