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...

While role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have been fairly well documented, studies on the internal functioning of the College of the European Commission have been almost lacking. Thus, highly inconsistent images exist; ranging...

The unequal access of interest organizations to the EU institutions is often associated with biased European politics. Nonetheless, systematic accounts of interest group access are rare. Rooted in the organizational theory of resource dependencies and drawing on a survey of 800 EU and national...

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...

One key indicator of profound change in a Westphalian state order might be the extent to which cleavages are cross-cutting national borders. The kind of conflict structure found at the European level is supposed to be highly dependent upon the institutional architecture at that same level....

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...

EU-integration is increasing in scope, depth and geographical space. It affects virtually all aspects of policy-making in EU member states. However, at the national level the impact varies widely across countries and sectors. This duality is likely to increase with the enlargement to the East....

The logic of appropriateness is a perspective that sees human action as driven by rules of appropriate or exemplary behavior, organized into institutions. Rules are followed because they are seen as natural, rightful, expected, and legitimate. Actors seek to fulfill the obligations encapsulated...

This study offers an organisation theory approach arguing that the differentiated organisatational constellation of the European Union contributes to a differentiated penetration of domestic government decision-making processes. It is argued that the European Commission mainly activates the...

This paper reports a comparative study of the Environmental Regulatory Agencies in Norway, Denmark and Finland. Increasingly and relatively independently these agencies are taking part in transnational networks in the EU involving the European Commission. A strong informal penetration, fuelled...