Kutsal Yesilkagit

Bureaucratic Autonomy, Organizational Culture, and Habituation Politicians and Independent Administrative Bodies in the Netherlands

What really does change when a bureaucratic agency is created? What will the nature of a new agency’s interactions be with political and administrative actors in its environment? Despite the large interest in administrative reform during the past few decades, there has been only little attention given to institutionalization processes that follow the creation of independent public agencies. This article formulates a model of political-bureaucratic adaptation between politicians and newly established agencies. It is built on the concepts of bureaucratic autonomy, administrative culture, and habituation. The model is illustrated with the case of Independent Administrative Bodies in the Netherlands.

Good neighbours or distant friends?: Trust between Dutch ministries and their executive agencies

Abstract Agencification has extended and intensified the delegation problem. It has created new (administrative) principals, who are confronted with even more uncertainty as agents operate at arms length. Trust is suggested as a new mode of governance. Based on the literature seven hypotheses are deduced on conditions that politicians can use to build trust: autonomy; contacts; policy involvement; and involvement in the design of monitoring devices. These hypotheses are tested using survey data on 219 Dutch executive agencies. Contrary to the expectations, executive agencies with low degrees of autonomy have a more trusting relationship with their parent ministry than agencies with high autonomy. Proximity and frequent interactions appear more important to trust than autonomy. Monitoring is not always perceived as a sign of distrust. These findings raise new questions on how principals can reduce the delegation problem and control executive agencies.

The Future of Administrative Tradition: Tradition as Ideas and Structure

During the past three decades, legislators and political executives of a large number of developed and developing countries have initiated a series of administrative reforms. Many developed and developing countries have followed the example of reformers in Anglo-Saxon countries but not all of them have followed similar pathways. Across a large number of countries, administrative reforms of different types have been attempted, initiated and implemented at various political and administrative levels at different times. For students of comparative administration this reform variety prompts questions. When and under what conditions do national policymakers implement public sector reforms? Why do some countries’ national policymakers implement certain reforms earlier than others? Why do certain countries never implement a specific reform at all? If a similar reform is implemented in a range of countries, why does the outcome of the implementation vary across these countries? Finally, from a comparative perspective, the interesting question is not when an administrative system but how much later another administrative system undergoes reform.

Core executives and party policies: Privatisation in the Netherlands

The role of core executives in co‐ordination processes is an important research topic in political science and public administration. This article analyses the co‐ordinating role of core executives and party politics in the area of privatisation in the Netherlands between 1980 and 1994. In this period, Ruud Lubbers was the prime minister of three successive cabinets. The first two rested on a centre‐right coalition, the last one was centre‐left. We try to answer two questions. First, which core executives are important to what kind of coordination form in the policy area of privatisation? Second, what are the consequences of political changes in government from a centre‐right to a centre‐left coalition for the role of the core executives and the co‐ordination style? We will argue, first, that the predominant coordination type in the Netherlands in this period was horizontal. Second, we argue that a change in party politics has no consequences for the co‐ordination process and the influence of the core exe...

The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-Preservation in Government

rebellions. As hypothesised, institutional advantages are indeed not the whole story. For instance, German (as well as Dutch) governments rather rely on partisan advantages which compensate them for their lack of institutional agenda-setting powers. The third dimension of agenda-setting power plays a prominent role in Switzerland, where governments exert considerable agenda control through their positional dominance of both the preand the post-parliamentary phase of legislation. In other countries, such as Denmark and Norway, governments are weak with respect to all three dimensions of agenda control and hence not able to influence the legislative agenda to an extent that governments in the other countries covered in this book are able to do. This collection is a state-of-the-art contribution to the study of legislative agendasetting at both the conceptual and the empirical level. It is not without some minor weaknesses, however. It is regrettable that some countries are not included (most importantly, Sweden). Another minor criticism is one that applies to many edited volumes: the framework laid out at the beginning of the book may be laudable but it is often not applied thoroughly in the country chapters. For instance, the positional dimension of agenda control is not discussed systematically throughout the volume. Remarkably, the collection’s distinction between institutional, partisan and positional aspects of agenda setting puts it closer to the historical institutionalist strand of research than previous investigations into parliamentary agenda control (which were much more firmly rooted in Rational Choice institutionalism). Bringing partisan and positional factors into the equation basically means paying more attention to contextual changes in time and hence studying institutional development rather than institutional choice (as Paul Pierson puts it). This last remark is less a criticism and more a reflection of the impressive level of sophistication of this volume’s approach to legislative agenda setting.

Internationalisation and Economic Institutions. Comparing European Experiences

bold challenge to those who would argue that the Euro’s adoption is a reflection of the dominance of capitalist interests in the EU or, more generally, that regional political integration is driven largely by them or the process of economic internationalisation. One puzzle remains: Duckenfield does not justify why he chose to focus on British and German business interests. Why did he not also include France, not least as it was the Euro’s most ardent and influential protagonist among the EU member states? One suspects that very pragmatic, as opposed to methodological, considerations guided the author’s choice in this respect. This omission or choice is a pity because, if he had included France in his analysis, the empirical evidence to support his argument as to the relative political impotence of business interests in Euro policy-making would (this reviewer believes) have looked more impressive still.