Administrative Sciences and the Multilevel Administrative State

Abstract

The challenge of understanding social and political order is enduring in the social sciences (Elster, 2007; Waldo, 1992) with continuous disputes over ‘the legitimate role of democratic politics in society’ and ‘forms of political association’ (Olsen, 2016: 1–5). This chapter makes a plea for public administration scholarship and organization theory to understand the multilevel administrative state. Government institutions are essential components of contemporary democracies and play fundamental building-blox in the democratic governing of modern societies (Dunleavy & Rhodes, 1990; Orren & Skowronek, 2017; Wilson, 1887: 221). In recent decades, however, architecture of government has faced profound challenges by being increasingly embedded into multilevel federal structures. Yet, political order formation above and beyond the nation state is less studied and still poorly understood (Benz et al., 2021). This chapter discusses administrative integration in the EU and examines implications for political order. Political order consists of a relatively stable arrangement of institutions that are formalized and institutionalized. One implication is that government civil servants carry dual roles in a multilevel executive order that span levels of authority. Serving as key actors in implementing and enforcing EU rules on national ground, government officials personalize multilevel executive orders by working within national ministries and agencies while simultaneously partaking in European administrative networks and interacting with EU agencies and the Commission (Egeberg, 2006; Trondal, 2010). The chapter outlines a conceptual scheme of administrative integration and outlines an organizational theory approach to account for dynamics of administrative (dis)integration.