Agency Governance in Integrated Administrative Systems

Abstract

What do public organizations do when subjected to conflicting influences on how to maneuver? What do government officials do when embedded in what Woodrow Wilson (1887: 221) described as ‘systems within systems’? This chapter conceptually outlines two possible responses and illustrate these with a large-N dataset on national government agencies embedded in two politico-administrative systems: The central administration of a unitary state and the administrative system of a quasi-federal order—the EU. When agency officials are thus subject to dual stimuli and influences, the question is how they are likely to respond. The relevance of the question is abundant since government agencies increasingly maneuver in situations where state sovereignty is under persistent stress (Ansell et al., 2017: 1; Easton, 1965; Gunnell, 2011; Miller, 1971). Mutual dependence, international cooperation, and delegation to nonelected bodies challenge nation states’ capacity to make democratically accountable decisions. These developments have spurred vibrant scholarly debate on the quality and conditions of political sovereignty (e.g., Dahl, 2000; Olsen, 2018; Rosenau, 1990). Much less understood, however, is the shifting role of government agencies and what role public administration plays in making sovereignty resilient (Egeberg & Trondal, 2015). As the public administration of states serves as core capacities for state building, the role of public agencies is key to understanding sustained state sovereignty (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2014: 10). Putting public administration center stage in the study of democratic governance, Dwight Waldo (1952) emphasized the semi-autonomous role of public administration. Since Waldo, government agencies have become essential opportunity structures in advanced democracies (Orren & Skowronek, 2017; Vibert, 2007). Their tasks range from collecting and analyzing information, coordinating, and regulating. Organizationally, government agencies represent a vertical fragmentation of the polity and a supply of administrative capacities to solve regulatory challenges. They are thus organizational compromises between a need for political steering and requisite professional autonomy and technical regulation. Government agencies are organized at arm’s length from their parent ministries, ensuring agencies to operate relatively insulted from political steering but at the same time organizationally exposed to ‘capture’ from EU-level institutions and processes (Egeberg & Trondal, 2017).