René Torenvlied

The paradox of compliance: infringements and delays in transposing European Union directives

What impact does the negotiation stage prior to the adoption of international agreements have on the subsequent implementation stage? We address this question by examining the linkages between decision making on European Union directives and any subsequent infringements and delays in national transposition. We formulate a preference-based explanation of failures to comply, which focuses on states’ incentives to deviate and the amount of discretion granted to states. This is compared with state-based explanations that focus on country-specific characteristics. Infringements are more likely when states disagree with the content of directives and the directives provide them with little discretion. Granting discretion to member states, however, tends to lead to longer delays in transposition. We find no evidence of country-specific effects.

The Power of the Presidency in EU Council Decision-making

Research on the presidency of the EU shows mixed results. Although most scholars agree that the EU presidency is not able to advance its domestic interests in the European forum, Tallberg (2006) provides evidence for presidency effects. In the present paper, we empirically estimate presidency-based power in the Council of the European Union on the DEU data — a large-scale data set containing EU policy issues from various policy areas. We show that holding the presidency does significantly and positively contribute to the bargaining power of member states, but only in the final stages of decision-making.

Network Embeddedness and Public Agency Performance: The Strength of Strong Ties in Dutch Higher Education

Current research in public management reports a positive effect of agency network activity in the interorganizational network on its performance (degree centrality hypothesis). This study presents a different hypothesis: The embeddedness of agency network relations in cohesive subgroups in the interorganizational network positively affects its performance (‘‘cohesive subgroup’’ hypothesis). The dependent variable in the present study is organizational performance and measured in terms of individual client satisfaction. The hypotheses are tested using data on the interorganizational network of Dutch colleges for the training of primary education teachers (n 5 28). These data are combined with college-level performance and contextual data for 2002–2005 (n 5 90), and with the evaluations of college graduates in a large sample of graduates for the same period (n 5 7,119). Multilevel logistic regression analyses show that colleges’ cohesive subgroup membership rather than college degree centrality significantly contributes to a positive evaluation by graduates. These analyses control for various control variables at the college level and the graduate level.

The Time-Dependent Effect of Conflict in the Council on Delays in the Transposition of EU Directives

This article analyses the effect of conflict in the Council of the European Union (EU) on delays in the transposition of EU directives. Based on enforcement and management theories, we predict that conflict in the Council speeds up the transposition process. In addition, we control for the instigation of infringement procedures by the Commission and expect a weaker effect of conflict in cases where the Commission disagrees with a directive and if directives grant more discretion to member states. These hypotheses are tested using two indicators of conflict: heterogeneity and polarization. Cox regression analysis is applied with time-dependent effects and with a shared frailty to control for the multilevel structure of the data. The analyses show that, over time, conflict has an increasing negative effect on delays.

Social Media and the New Organization of Government Communications: An Empirical Analysis of Twitter Usage by the Dutch Police

Do social media de-bureaucratize the organization of government communications? Key features of the bureaucratic ideal-type are centralized and formalized external communications and disconnection of internal and external communications. Some authors argue that this organizational model is being replaced by a less bureaucratic model that better fits the communication demands of the information society. To explore this argument empirically, the use of twitter by Dutch police departments is investigated through an analysis of 982 accounts and 22 interviews. The empirical analysis shows that most twitter communication takes place through decentralized channels. While a minority of police officers use personal names on twitter, most use their formal identity. Twitter is mostly used for external communication but the mutual interest in the twitter communications of other police officers is substantial. The study nuances the idea of transformative change: the old bureaucratic and the new models manifest themselves in the hybrid organization of social media communications.

Managing The Environment

Abstract The literature on network management in the public sector reports positive effects of network activity on agency performance. Current studies show however no differences between specific types of contacts in an agencys environment. The present article adopts an explorative design to study the different types of environmental actors in the networks of nine colleges for nursing studies in the Netherlands. A typology of environmental ties is introduced, and applied to the nine cases. It appears that contacts to different types of actors reflect different levels of ambition in the network management of the colleges. The level of ambition in network management appears to be associated with two indicators for college performance: it is positively associated with diploma rate, and negatively associated with drop-out rates among freshmen. These results are discussed with reference to the current literature in public network management.

Information, commitment, and consensus: A comparison of three perspectives on delegation in the European Union

Three perspectives on delegation in the European Union are presented in this article. The transaction-costs perspective focuses on information asymmetries between policy makers and implementers. According to the commitment perspective, policy makers delegate authority as a solution to commitment problems. The consensus-building perspective views the decision to delegate as a trade-off between decisiveness and inclusiveness during the bargaining process. Hypotheses are derived from these perspectives regarding the amount of delegation to both the European Commission and to member states in legislation. From detailed information on eighty-six EU laws, there is some evidence for the transaction-costs perspective as an explanation of delegation to the Commission. With respect to delegation to member states, there is some evidence for both the transaction-costs perspective and the consensus-building perspective.

Civic Organizations as Political Actors Mapping and Predicting the Involvement of Civic Organizations in Neighborhood Problem-Solving and Coproduction

Despite the scholarly consensus on the importance of civic organizations for the livability of neighborhoods, there are relatively few empirical studies examining to what extent these organizations engage in various forms of political participation to contribute to the quality of the neighborhood. The authors argue that to get a better overview of neighborhood-oriented forms of participation, it is necessary to look beyond those organizations with an explicit focus on the neighborhood and to include newer forms of participation such as coproduction, government-initiated plans that seek to address neighborhood issues through extensive cooperation with organizations. The authors argue that three groups of factors determine organizational participation: resources, engagement, and network position. An empirical analysis of survey data collected in 2007 from 400 organizations in eight neighborhoods in two Dutch cities shows that the impact of resources is virtually absent, whereas concern about the neighborhood and relations to pivotal organizations are positively related to participation.

The multiple dimensions of managerial networking

Studies in public management show that agencies draw different types of support from different actors and organizations in their environment. If this is true, we would expect that managers differentiate their networking activity toward different types of external actors and organizations. However, empirical studies of the networking activities of managers do not reveal such a differentiation: these studies consistently report the existence of only one factor of managerial networking activity. The present article aims to solve this puzzle by disaggregating managerial networking into multiple scales of managerial networking activity, each related to a specific type of support from the agency’s environment. A cumulative scaling analysis of the network ties of Texas school district superintendents for the years 2002 and 2005 shows the existence of three such stable and homogeneous networking scales, respectively, providing (a) political support, (b) bureaucratic coping, and (c) coproduction. We compare these results with those of the method used in previous studies: factor analysis. We illustrate the potential of cumulative scaling for the analysis of managerial networking by comparing the effect of the managerial networking factor with those of the three networking scales on the pass rates of Latino students on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of managerial networking.

Models of collective decision-making

Decision making often requires the application of a procedure and the exercise of power, resulting in an authoritative allocation of values.