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 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 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...

This chapter analyses the processes and dynamics of institution building in the European Union (EU). While most studies of EU institution building have dealt with the birth and evolution of key institutions, such as the legislatives, the executives or the courts, the focus is here on a different...

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...

The subject of this paper is the institutional dynamics of the European University. How is this key institution affected by ongoing processes of European integration? What attempts are undertaken at the European level to build up institutional capacity in the areas of higher education and...

Despite advances in contemporary research on the European Administrative Space (EAS), no widespread understanding about its meaning, mechanisms and significance yet exists. This research agenda paper offers a comprehensive conceptualisation of EAS and takes stock of accumulated lessons learned....

Despite advances in contemporary research on the European Administrative Space (EAS), no widespread understanding about its meaning, mechanisms and significance yet exists. This research agenda paper offers a comprehensive conceptualisation of EAS and takes stock of accumulated lessons learned....

Establishing separate executive bodies of a confederation or of a nascent federation of states seems in many respects to be the ‘hard case’ of institution-building. This article argues that ‘agencification’ at the EU level is basically about increasing the potential for more uniform...

How is the EU utilizing national bureaucracies, this paper asks. It reports findings from semi-structured interviews with ship inspectors and their superiors about international training efforts aimed at harmonizing inspections. The maritime sector, with its highly institutionalized global...