ABSTRACT This paper examines how institutional mechanisms shape gender disparities in judicial promotion within a career‐based civil‐law system, where judges advance through merit‐based hierarchies punctuated by discretionary appointments to higher courts. By design, civil‐law judiciaries are typically governed by bureaucratic, merit‐based promotion procedures. Yet even in such systems, women remain underrepresented in senior judicial positions. We develop a model to distinguish between two mechanisms— promotion aversion and sex discrimination—and derive empirically testable implications. Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset covering the full careers of nearly 7000 Spanish judges from 2005 to 2023, we combine survival models, matched mixed‐effects regressions, and data on voluntary specialization exams to analyze career advancement. Our results show that promotion aversion and sex discrimination operate at different stages of judicial careers: women who apply for promotion are highly qualified and successful in early‐career moves, but face structural barriers in later discretionary appointments. These findings challenge assumptions about the neutrality of bureaucratic promotion systems and underscore the role of institutional discretion in reproducing inequality. The paper contributes to comparative studies of career public servants and the governance of judicial hierarchies.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the extent to which collaborative platforms contribute to strengthening the collaborative governance capacity of municipal governments, focusing on smart city development as an empirical context. Drawing on survey data from 289 municipal government officials and using a multinomial logit model, we test eight hypotheses linking collaborative platforms to key dimensions of collaborative governance: knowledge sharing, innovation culture, competences, strategic orientation, monitoring, vertical and internal coordination, and decision‐making power. Our findings challenge the prevailing assumption that such platforms are uniformly beneficial. While their presence might support some collaborative governance dimensions, their contribution is less certain in others. Moreover, in some cases, our data shows that municipalities managing collaborative governance initiatives by means of a collaborative platform might perform just as well or even worse than those without one. These results suggest that expectations about collaborative platforms should be more carefully calibrated. By critically examining the contribution of collaborative platforms across key dimensions of collaborative governance, this study advances theoretical understanding and offers actionable insights for municipal platform managers and policymakers.

ABSTRACT This article asks “who controls the controllers” now that the European Commission—long responsible for controlling the conduct of industrial policy in the EU's internal market—increasingly pursues its own industrial policy objectives. We draw on delegation theory to establish why the Commission should be held accountable for its industrial policy‐making and, based on a distinction between procedural and substantive accountability, develop a simple typology of accountability outcomes that helps us distinguish between full accountability, partial accountability, and unaccountability in the realm of industrial policy. To assess empirically whether and how the Commission has been held accountable in its pursuit of industrial policy, we leverage a new dataset that tracks Commission follow‐ups—both in writing and in terms of policy actions—to 432 points raised in own‐initiative reports by the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy between 2019 and 2024. Our analysis suggests that the Commission has been far more responsive in “words” than in “actions”, which carries implications for our understanding of executive‐legislative relations and democratic accountability not only in industrial policy but also in other EU policy domains.

ABSTRACT How do law and politics interact in shaping the relationship between the state and markets? To what extent can the law break free from the political and ideological beliefs which brought it about, and be repurposed to adjust to evolving assumptions and a new political‐economic Zeitgeist ? This paper explores how the dynamics between law and politics play out in the context of the European Union as a multi‐level polity, where economic powers and prerogatives are distributed across different levels of government and where the central government enjoys limited, conferred powers. Drawing on the “Integration through Law” literature and institutional change theories, the paper investigates the evolution of EU industrial policy and its legal architecture. It lays out the legal rules and conditions under which industrial policy has traditionally operated in the EU. It further discusses how this framework is shifting following changing economic and political priorities that favor more activist forms of economic and industrial policy. The paper argues that the law can both act as a constraining, limiting factor, or as an enabler of EU industrial policy initiatives. On the one hand primary law principles and competences fundamentally inhibit the pursuit of activist industrial policies in Europe. On the other hand, a number of second‐order resources can be mobilized and “converted” to bring about an EU industrial policy. The paper finally reflects on the risks and challenges of repurposing legal rules for political ends, highlighting issues of consistency, efficiency and legitimacy.

ABSTRACT Despite its new‐found penchant for market interventionism, the European Union (EU) is often portrayed as lacking the fiscal and administrative capacity to conduct industrial policy. The EU can regulate markets, the conventional wisdom goes, but not steer them in specific directions. In this article, we challenge the notion that regulation and industrial policy are inherently antithetical, arguing instead that the Commission uses its regulatory authority over state aid to indirectly steer member states' industrial policies. We theorize and empirically investigate this rules‐as‐tools approach to industrial policy through an in‐depth, multi‐method case study on the transformation of the EU's state aid regime, with a focus on the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER). Combining original interviews, topic modeling, document analysis, and descriptive statistics, we demonstrate that the Commission has long used state aid regulation not only to restrict but also redirect state aid. Increasingly, it employs these rules to encourage selective interventions in the economy—particularly those supporting the twin transitions of digitalization and decarbonization.

ABSTRACT Existing literature shows that increasing political oversight of bureaucrats can improve the quality of government service delivery. Yet when the state is mainly concerned with maximizing revenue extraction from society, increasing bureaucratic oversight may result in social loss. I illustrate this argument with evidence from the Great Chinese Famine, drawing on panel data covering over 2000 counties. I show that weather shocks, which increased central‐local information asymmetry on local grain production, reduced the central state's capability to effectively monitor local bureaucrats' effort in grain extraction. This informational barrier to oversight led to greater local autonomy in setting grain extraction quotas. During the famine, this autonomy allowed county officials to relax the execution of excessive grain extraction targets from above, thereby reducing the mortality costs of the state's grain extraction policy. This finding highlights the perils of bureaucratic control in authoritarian states.

ABSTRACT What allows ministers and senior civil servants to survive, or even thrive, in their political‐administrative contexts? Based upon a multi‐sited ethnography, this article identifies the unwritten “rules of the game” among elite political and administrative actors in the Danish and Dutch core executives and analyzes their beliefs about how to survive and thrive at the apex of executive government. The analysis is grounded in core executive research and seeks to advance our understanding of the beliefs and practices that shape the behavior of government elites. Our decentered approach to qualitative inquiry allows us to identify a high degree of overlap between how Danish and Dutch core executive actors understand the unwritten rules of the systems they inhabit. This suggests that despite formal structural differences between core executive systems, they perhaps differ significantly less in practice, as the beliefs and behaviors of ministers and senior public servants are more alike than classic accounts would suggest.

ABSTRACT Government officials are key actors in managing processes of institutional design and reorganization in increasingly emergent and diversified public structures. This study expands on a framework for assessing the predictive strength of key legitimacy dimensions on officials' governance preferences. The framework is applied to officials' preferences for third‐party and collaborative governance arrangements. The study is based on data from a for‐purpose designed survey conducted among Finnish top‐level government officials. The findings show that officials' governance preferences are strongly contingent on their perceptions of political rules as well as procedural norms pertinent to the representative structures they serve. The article thus contributes to the field of governance research with a focus on the interface between representative government and governance structures. Furthermore, the applied legitimacy framework proved fruitful for addressing the problem of indeterminacy that characterizes many legitimacy concepts. The approach has considerable comparative potentials for predicting governance preferences but also effects of legitimacy perceptions in a wider sense.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the accountability paradoxes that emerge when public administrations operate under conditions of financial resource abundance and explores how these paradoxes are managed in practice. Focusing on Italian universities in the wake of Next Generation EU (NGEU) funding, the study applies paradox theory to reconceptualize accountability as a dynamic, processual, and relational phenomenon. The findings reveal that rather than reducing complexity, financial abundance amplifies and transforms accountability pressures into persistent, multidimensional paradoxes. Through qualitative analysis, three core accountability paradoxes are identified, along with the coping strategies universities use to navigate them. The results show that accountability paradoxes are never solved, but they require a dynamic adaptation and negotiation among competing demands. The study advances the literature on public sector accountability by highlighting the challenges and opportunities of public service delivery in resource‐rich environments.

ABSTRACTMany European countries are concerned about the asymmetric distribution of refugees within their territory. In response, they have developed policies to spatially disperse asylum seekers. Yet, we lack a comprehensive understanding of such refugee dispersal policies (RDPs). This article fills that gap with two contributions. First, we conceptualize RDPs as systems of subnational responsibility‐sharing in asylum governance, defined along five policy attributes and three ideal types. Second, we introduce a novel dataset covering the dispersal policies of 32 European countries and develop an index of policy restrictiveness. We show that dispersal is widespread but varies in formality and design. Most countries adopt a negotiated model combining binding spatial allocation, material incentives, and discretionary dispersal criteria. Restrictiveness is higher in states with high past arrivals and strong local autonomy. Our findings offer new insights into the spatial governance of asylum and the institutional design of responsibility‐sharing mechanisms.