The European Commission, Europe's central supranational bureaucracy, is often depicted as a playground for external interests. The scholarly literature offers a range of sensible explanations how the Commission position is bound by national, organised societal, or party political interests....

The aim of this paper is to understand how decision making processes within the EU comes to affect the structures for national policy making within the employment field. The paper addresses the question of how the process of writing new employment guidelines for the EES – European employment...

The paper addresses the issue of the commercial reuse of public sector information (PSI) and analyzes from a comparative perspective various reuse regimes to be considered by national legislators. Directive 2003/98/EC provides at the EU level the policy context in which the Member States operate...

International comparisons of Civil Services usually overlook the difficulties due to differing definitions of the civil service in national legal systems. Comparative statistics are therefore extremely misleading, as they are at best based on formal-legal criteria instead of being based on...

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...