Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.

While research has examined how reputation shapes regulatory agencies' behavior, comparatively less attention has been paid to advisory bodies. Yet, these entities engage in forms of indirect regulation that illuminate key modalities of the EU regulatory state. In particular, advisory bodies engaging in technology assessment and anticipatory governance can play a significant part in shaping nascent policymakers' preferences by highlighting the potential impacts of emerging technologies and innovation. Consequently, effective reputation management is critical to these agencies' influence. We begin to explore those considerations by examining the Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Unit at the European Parliament. Our findings suggest that the STOA Unit prioritizes reputation types that showcase its competence. Heightened reputational threats are met with a stronger focus on performative reputation and lower emphasis on regulatory stringency for the policy options considered. This last point highlights how agencies' assessments of external threats and domain can influence their approach to reputation management.

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.