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This book examines Max Weber's understanding of bureaucracy by applying his ideas to the development of officialdom from the ninth century to the present in six territories: England, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, and Hungary. Edward Page takes a broad view of bureaucracy that includes not only officials in important central or national institutions but also those providing goods and services locally. The 'scorecard' is based on expected developments in four key areas of Weber's analysis: the functional differentiation of tasks within government, professionalism, formalism, and monocracy. After discussing the character of officialdom in the ninth, twelfth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-first centuries, the book reveals that Weber's scorecard has a mixed record, especially weak in its account of the development of monocracy and formalism. A final chapter discusses alternative conceptions of bureaucratic development and sets out an account based on understanding processes of routinization, institutional integration, and the instrumentalization of law.
This book addresses an important element of public governance, providing a systematic investigation of rewards for working in the public sector, and looks at the impacts of the choices of reward structures. It will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative public administration, international politics and government worldwide.
With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism, the transformational strategies embraced by political and technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three re...
This book examines the effects of personnel turnover in European Union institutions. Individuals enter and exit EU institutions with remarkable frequency, and questions involving institutional personnel lie at the heart of populist and feminist critiques of the EU. Are these critiques accurate? How do personnel dynamics affect the EU’s legitimacy? Will changing patterns of turnover help to redeem the EU? Personnel Turnover addresses these issues by considering turnover’s effects on three aspects of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output). Authors use a common framework to explore various questions: Does turnover affect the ways that EU citizens see the EU or the likelihood that citizens will participate in EU elections? Does turnover affect the efficiency of the EU decision-making or the EU’s ability to promote its interests abroad? In tackling these contemporary subjects, the authors throw light on a classical question—what difference does it make when political leaders are replaced?
This book examines regulatory capacity beyond the nation state. It suggests that we can only understand why EU agencies are able to build EU regulatory capacity if we acknowledge that national regulators provide their expertise, staff and resources to the regulatory processes taking place in these EU bodies. This raises the puzzle of why national regulators are willing to provide ‘life support’ to potentially rival organisations. The book is devoted to answering this question in order to understand how EU regulatory capacity is created in the absence of a full supranational regulatory bureaucracy. To do so, the book studies to what extent national regulators from two countries (the UK and Germany) support EU agencies in their work across four policy sectors (drug safety, food safety, maritime safety and banking supervision). The book makes a significant contribution by developing a bureaucratic politics perspective that highlights the importance of national regulators for EU regulatory capacity building.
This book offers an innovative theoretical and empirical analysis of integration in EU foreign and interior policies across the three pillars, from the Maastricht Treaty to the Treaty of Nice. The establishment of the three pillar structure with the Maastricht Treaty has been one of the key transformations of European governance. This divided EU policies into three main areas: European Community, Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and for the first time the two sovereignty related areas of foreign and interior policies became part of the formal governance structure of the EU. This is the first volume to present a comparative perspective on how integr...
This book investigates how development institutions created and promoted marketized development financial instruments to increase the speed and scope of assistance by leveraging private financial markets for development objectives. To attract private investors, donor governments agreed to bear the risk in these new instruments in order to mobilize investment during times of political crisis. In particular, this book contends that Germany’s KfW played an outsized role in the development of these new financial instruments, particularly in microfinance banks and structured funds, as KfW’s unique institutional attributes and strong political support from the German government at critical junctures fostered financial innovation. Using over 70 interviews and a cache of newly released archival materials, this books documents how KfW and other development institutions created and promoted these marketized development financial instruments, and how they have become a pillar of modern development policy.
Previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, this volume analyzes the party-state linkages in post-communist Europe alongside three analytical dimensions.