The Danish Euro-Party System*

In direct elections to the European Parliament, the behaviour of the Danish electorate, unlike that of other member countries of the EC, deviates strongly from the usual party pattern of national, general elections, thus producing a very differently structured Euro-party system. The existence of this distinct Euro-party system has been confirmed in the two consecutive Euro-elections of 1979 and 1984. This article analyses the special electoral behaviour of the Danish voters in Euro-elections. The deviation is explained primarily by the presence of a European cleavage in the Danish electorate which partly counteracts normal party identification. While supporters of Danish membership of EC vote just as they do in national, general elections, opponents of EC behave in a very different way. The voting in Euro-elections has become a mixture of election and referendum behaviour.     

Begrenzte Rationalität und regulatives Lernen in der EG: die Liberalisierung der Elektrizitätsversorgung

The article analyses the liberalization of the EC electricity supply industry. Confronting the intergovernmental approach, the case study is based on the premise that the member state executives act within the limits of a bounded rationality and do therefore not always represent clear and fixed interests in EU negotiations. Taking the examples of France and Germany, it shows that the national positions and preferences may change greatly during the course of the decision making process. While the French positional changes may be reasonably well explained by the intergovernmental approach, the German preference changes are attributed to effects of the EC institutions and negotiations. Institutional principles, policy-concepts and fairness criteria guide member state orientations and behavior and hinder the pursuit of unilateral advantages. Incremental negotiation techniques within the Council induce learning processes and cause reassessments of the domestic situations. Furthermore, the EC decisions may cause behavioral changes which clearly surpass their regulatory content even if they contain extensive flexibilisation mechanisms.     

The Question of Roles and Identities in Public Administration

The article argues that one needs to open up the question of what it means to be a civil servant today in order to understand the key characteristics of public administration in contemporary Western democracies. The role of the civil servant is characterised by a multitude of expectations deriving from old and new role demands that exist side by side. In this sense, the role is constituted of different archaeological layers. Which layers become the dominant ones are not given, but widely depend on the context within which the role is enacted and on the civil servant's individual role interpretation. The article presents the results of a case study carried out within three Danish government ministries on the role of the civil servant. It is shown how differently the role is interpreted in the Danish state administration depending on which of the archaeological layers are activated, and how these different interpretations all lead to role conflicts for the individual civil servant.     

Interministerielle Netzwerke: Formale und informelle Koordinationsstrukturen bei der Vorbereitung der deutschen Verhandlungspositionen zur Regierungskonferenz 1996

How do German ministries manage the preparation of national negotiation positions for EU intergovernmental conference? After a survey of the debate on organizational deficits of the interministerial coordination in Germany, we are consulting decision- and organization-theoretic approaches in IR. Drawing on organizational economics we concretise and supplement these older frameworks. We conceive the management of a governmental organization as a specific aggregation of heterogeneous preferences and information. Applying social network analysis we take into account formal as well as informal aspects of coordination channels. The objective of this article is to make visible the complex structures and processes that constitute foreign policy making, and to provide a preliminary assessment of its efficiency.     

Delegation without Agency Loss? The Use of Performance Contracts in Danish Central Government

Performance contracts entered between ministerial departments and their agencies are used throughout the Danish central government. The article analyzes the use of performance contracting in 2005. The analysis draws on transaction cost theory and actor-centered institutionalism, stressing the bargaining aspect of hierarchy and the importance of economic and political transaction costs. The analysis shows considerable variation in the content of performance demands. Ministries with different organizational designs use contracts in markedly different ways and agencies with a strong interface to individual citizens and businesses are more likely to meet demands regulating policy delivery and service levels. Further, contracts contain substantive clauses, the terms of which are largely assessable. It also shows that performance contracts only rarely specify demands related to cost efficiency within agencies. Many of these results are statistically significant, even though a general point is the wide variation in the implementation of performance contracts between individual ministries.     

The Danes and Europe: From EC 1972 to Euro 2000 – Elections, Referendums and Attitudes

Within Europe, the Danish electorate is the one that has most often expressed its opinion about the European Union in elections and in national referendums. Votes and attitudes are analysed for the five elections to the European Parliament between 1979 and 1999 and in the six referendums – from the first on membership of the EC in 1972 to the September 2000 referendum on acceptance of the euro, the European single currency. The article gives an overview of the development of Danish public opinion in relation to the European Union from 1960 to 2000, the turnouts at referendums, and the elections and results for the European Parliament. It is shown that since Denmark joined the EU, public opinion has fluctuated greatly, although the balance among Danish European Parliament members has remained stable. The reasons for the frequent use of referendums in Denmark and a thematic outline of the six referendums are put forward. The article concludes with a comprehensive analysis of public attitudes towards the referendum on the euro in 2000. It is shown that regional electoral patterns have vanished, but underlying attitudes are manifested in the public.     

Performance Contracts and Goal Attainment in Government Agencies

ABSTRACT

Public sector reforms introducing performance contracts provide a unique opportunity to investigate goals set for government agencies and factors affecting goal attainment. The article maps the set of goals contained in performance contracts for Danish government agencies in 2000, 2005, and 2008. Performance contracts are found to reflect the complex character of agency goals with performance goals ranging from project initiation to reducing case work time or increasing productivity. The article also analyzes factors affecting goal attainment. Agencies with a large percentage of goals focused on project initiation and production exhibit higher levels of goal attainment. Also, goal attainment improves as agencies and ministries gain experience with performance contracts.

For practitioners, it is relevant that contracts target a wide variety of goals and over time focus increasingly on results. Contracts serve to focus agency attention as three quarters of all demands are met. A crucial factor seems to be whether agencies are in control of formulating and meeting goals. Efforts to improve the contract regime may thus concentrate on enabling government departments to secure ambitious and relevant performance goals.     

A framework for the comparative analysis of church–state relations in Europe

This article analyses how the policies specified in EU directives are transposed by EU member states. In contrast to existing transposition studies it develops a policy-specific approach to explain how directives are transposed by national actors. In this approach the outcome of transposition depends on the institutional arena in which decision-making takes place and the interests of the domestic actors involved. These institutional arenas can vary from parliament to national ministries and agencies. Domestic actors are taken as policy-specific veto players. Their preferences may lead to two different responses to the requirements of a directive. First, they can transpose a directive literally, keeping deviations to a minimum. Second, domestic actors can adopt a non-literal interpretation of the directive, leading to more substantial deviations within the boundaries allowed by the European Commission. These responses are illustrated by two cases of transposition of EU directives, the tobacco products directive and the animal trade directive. The case analysis shows that the policy-specific approach proposed in this article helps in understanding transposition. It clarifies how the ambitions formulated in Brussels are transformed by national administrations into policies.     

Subnational Governments in the Negotiation of the Multiannual Financial Framework 2014–2020: The Case of Spain

The negotiation of the Multiannual Financial Framework 2014–2020 has been an outstanding topic on the agenda of the EU during the past few years, on which subnational units also tried to have a say. In this article we analyse the formal institutional framework available for the Spanish Autonomous Communities to participate in the negotiation of the Cohesion Policy 2014–2020 and the Common Agriculture Policy 2014–2020. By analysing this participation, this text explores how this institutional framework has evolved during the past few years and how the Autonomous Communities could represent their interests at the domestic and supranational level within these crucial negotiations.     

Bread-and-Butter Agreement and High Politics Disagreement Some Reflections on the Contextual Impact on Agricultural Interests in EC Policy-Making*

In public policy literature a classical argument is that the scope and content of decisions shape both the structure of the policy-making process and the configuration of actors involved. Recent studies have strongly emphasized that the patterns of segmentation and specialization found in national policy-making are also found in EC policy-making. Against this background, the present article discusses the conditions and impact of agricultural interests in EC policy-making in light of the economic crisis of recent years and the increasing budgetary problems faced by the EC. The article illustrates, especially with reference to the Danish case, the special importance of the national interest organization-government relationship for the strategies pursued by national agricultural interest organizations in influencing EC/CAP policy-making. Furthermore, the article indicates how policy-making concerning the CAP has become more complicated as a consequence of the general economic crisis and recent sharp fall in farmers' incomes. National governments are the central actors in the Community policy-making process, and their impulse to promote exclusive national interests in the Community policy-making process has increased. In addition, agriculture has been integrated in the overall Community ‘crisis’ policy, and this development has weakened the segmentation in relation to the CAP. However, because of the general problems of the EC, the national agricultural organizations of the various member states have a growing interest in emphasizing joint activities and mutual agreement with regard to fundamental agricultural issues on Community level. This may affect the role of COPA leaving it primarily as a coordinator and mediator among the various national agricultural organizations, because pressures are more likely to succeed at the national level than at the EC level. This is where ‘bread-and-butter’ agreement really counts in the future. The alternative is that COPA will lose its credibility in EC policy-making.     

Decentralized planning in Kenya

In 1983 the Government of Kenya embarked on an accelerated programme of decentralization known as ‘District Focus’. This exercise in devolution is aimed at promoting more effective and efficient use of scarce domestic resources through efforts to strengthen planning capacity at the district level, improve horizontal integration among operating ministry field agents, and expand authority to district heads of operating ministries for managing financial and procurement aspects of local project implementation. Given the importance of this initiative to the economic growth of Kenya and the current search for administrative reforms that could help accelerate rural development in Africa, District Focus merits close attention by development experts. This article reviews the historical background, content, and implementation progress of District Focus.     

International Organization as a Seal of Approval: European Union Accession and Investor Risk

Much of the literature on international institutions argues that membership regularizes expectations about members' future behavior. Using the accession of the postcommunist countries as a test case, this article argues that the EU can send strong signals to financial markets about the trajectory of a particular country. Examining spreads on sovereign debt from 1990 to 2006, this article shows that closing negotiation chapters on domestic economic policy—in other words, receiving a seal of approval from Brussels that previously existing policy reform is acceptable to the wider EU—substantially decreases perceptions of default risk in those countries. That decrease operates independently from policy reform that the country has taken and is also distinct from selection processes (modeled here with new variables, including UNESCO World Heritage sites and domestic movie production, that proxy for cultural factors). Thus, this particular international organization has played an important role in coordinating market sentiment on members, conferring confidence that policy reform alone could not accomplish.     

Negotiating Municipal Merger

This article contributes to organizational research by describing the format and space of negotiation arenas – temporary arenas with diverse social order characteristics. The article also contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of different logics of negotiation. We compare two cases from the Norwegian Local Government Reform. The empirical phenomena of a negotiation arena, where municipalities negotiate potential mergers, provides relevant knowledge. Results from the study show that, despite similar conditional factors, we find significant differences in how the municipalities approach and organize the process, how it evolves and how it ends. We argue that the motivation and design of the negotiation arena not only affect the dominating logic of negotiation through the processes, but also the foundation for any potential mergers. Logics of negotiation are related to the initial characteristics of the negotiation arena, but also become an important variable in the development of this negotiation arena. In this way, the article illustrates a two-way interaction between social order and logics of negotiation, and shows why negotiation arenas differ and change over time.     

Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Interstitial Transformation and the Cooperative Movement

In the past few decades, states across several disparate geographical contexts have adopted policies and initiatives aimed at institutionalizing their relationship with groups constituted as “their” diasporas. These practices, which range from creating new ministries for diaspora affairs and reserving seats in the national legislature to granting dual citizenship and allowing members of the diaspora to participate in domestic elections, seem to have a very specific purpose. They are aimed at integrating diasporas as part of a larger “global” nation that is connected to, and has claims on the institutional structure of the home state. This article argues that the best way to understand this phenomenon, conceptualized here as the “domestic abroad”, is to see it as the product of two simultaneous, ongoing processes: the diasporic imagining of the nation, and the neoliberal restructuring of the state. Furthermore, to make sense of the nature and relationship of these processes, we need to focus on the development of capitalist social relations on both global and national scales. This, it is contended, can be best done through the development of a theoretical framework based on the historical materialist concept of hegemony.     

Runaway Bureaucracy? Exploring the Role of Nordic Regulatory Agencies in the European Union

This article reports a comparative study of the Environmental Regulatory Agencies in Norway, Denmark and Finland. Increasingly and relatively independently these agencies are taking part in transnational networks in the European Union involving the European Commission. An informal penetration, fuelled by faster electronic technology, is taking place between the European Commission and the regulatory agencies, largely outside the control of the domestic politico-administrative leadership. Changes in the character of the states' public administrations serve as an important background for these developments, a distinctive feature being the 'agencification' of the administrative apparatus during the last decades. Due to their relative autonomy, the national regulatory agencies are well placed to work 'double-hatted' in the sense that they interact directly with the European Commission at the same time as they perform traditional tasks as agents of national ministries. This development may challenge the image of integrated administrative apparatus and the notion of transparent and democratic governance.     

国际贸易谈判的政治经济分析:一个初步的框架(6)

加入WTO将给中国的改革开放进程带来深远的影响,也将会对中国的经济管理体制改革和政府管理体制改革带来巨大的挑战。对国际政治经济学有关贸易与国内政治的研究、国际贸易理论关于贸易政策之形成的研究、国际关系理论和博弈论关于国际谈判的研究进行了评述,并从国际政治经济学的角度提出分析国际贸易谈判的一个初步的分析框架。通过强调国内政治、策略行为和国际规则的重要性,并从公民政策偏好的形成、利益集团集体行动、两国贸易谈判之间的双层博弈、国际规则的制约因素等多方面讨论了如何分析贸易谈判。     

Portfolio allocation patterns and policy-making effectiveness in minority coalition governments

Although minority coalition has become a relatively frequent form of governance, it is often considered politically ineffective in policy making. To obtain sufficient support in parliament, government bills must go through the scrutiny activities initiated by coalition partners and overcome the concerns of external support parties in opposition. By examining parliamentary scrutiny on government bills, this paper explains the surprising policy-making effectiveness in minority coalition governments. Specifically, we argue and show that different patterns of portfolio allocation with the specific ideological locations of the ministerial office-holder, the coalition partner and the external supporter, structure the extent to which government bills are scrutinized in parliament, and therefore, the effectiveness of the minority coalition on managing and implementing policies. We empirically examine bills initiated by 256 ministries in 13 Danish minority coalitions between 1985 and 2015, and we reveal robust evidence that corroborates our argument.     

Competition policy and institutional politics in the European Community: State aid control and small business promotion

Abstract. The article examines EC competition policy from a political science perspective, analyzing the political and institutional considerations which inform the development of the Commission's controlling capacities in competition. It concentrates on policy towards small businesses in manufacturing. We argue that the Commission's general capacities in the formation and the administration of competition policy have been growing in both the merger-controlling aspects and in the control of state subsidization. Against this background, the handling of state aid to small businesses presents us with a paradox: the more developed the enforcement system in competition, the less the Commission applied it to national subsidization of small-scale production. The role of EC competition policy and particularly the subtle handling of state subsidies should be analyzed as part of the developing system of Community policy vis-à-vis small business, encompassing measures at the EC and national levels. Community policy has emerged as a result of an accommodation between different EC institutional and domestic political objectives, and to some extent this accommodation has been achieved at the expense of policy content. The article traces the development of Community policy in this area from the early 1970s to the adoption of the first-ever detailed policy guidelines in 1992, and suggests an analytical scheme for explaining the emergence of small business promotion as an issue in EC institutional politics.     

Divisor Methods for Sequential Portfolio Allocation in Multi-Party Executive Bodies: Evidence from Northern Ireland and Denmark

Some proportional representation (PR) rules can also be used to specify the sequence in which each party in a parliament or each member in a multiparty governing coalition is given its choice about (unique) desired resources, e.g., "indivisible goods" such as cabinet ministries or executive positions, thus providing an algorithmic method for determining "fair" allocations. Divisor rule sequencing using the d'Hondt method was recently used to determine the ten cabinet positions in the Northern Ireland Executive Committee created under the 1998 Belfast ("Good Friday") Agreement; and such sequential allocation procedures have been used in some Danish municipal governments, and for determination of committee chairs in the European parliament. Here we examine in some detail the procedures used in Northern Ireland and Denmark, with a focus on special features such as the option in Denmark to form post-election alliances.     

Games borrower governments play: the implementation of economic adjustment programmes in Cyprus and Portugal

Research on the Economic Adjustment Programmes (EAPs) for Eurozone crisis countries has so far acknowledged the role of creditor countries and Troika institutions or has examined the economic effects or structural determinants of domestic implementation processes. The role of borrower governments as strategic actors within the ‘Troika complex’ has been neglected. Taking Cyprus and Portugal as cases in point, the article shows how reform-oriented borrower governments used the interaction with the Troika to overcome veto player opposition to programme implementation. Drawing on the two-level game and on negotiation theory, the study discusses borrower strategies in response to opposition from the court or parliament, and the costs of no agreement. Reform-oriented governments mostly used commitments to the international level or Troika pressure to pursue coercive strategies vis-à-vis domestic opponents. High costs of no agreement seem to be a necessary means to pass on political and market pressure through coercion.