Integration of the Swedish Local Elite: The Role of Professional and Private Networks

This article uses social network data to study the integration of local elites in four Swedish municipalities. Four research questions are asked. First: How integrated are the elites? While the results modify the picture that there are two rather distinct elites in Sweden – that is, a political elite dominated by the labour movement and an economic elite dominated by business and the large business organizations – it is interesting to note that integration between elite spheres is lowest for the relation between politicians and business representatives. To a considerable degree, integration between political and economic elites is indirect, mediated through the administrative elite. The second question is: Are the inner elite circles dominated by the political, economic or administrative elite? The study indicates that local elites in Sweden are strongly dominated by political elites, and also by administrative elites. This is reassuring, since it would indicate a democratic deficit if the structural power of decision making in municipalities resided predominantly in economic actors and administrators. The third question is: What is the role of friendship relations in creating elite integration? The study indicates that private relations among elites both reinforce professional networks and extend them in important ways. The final question is: Is elite integration contingent on political stability and/or the structure of local business? The results are surprisingly stable across the four municipalities, even though the largest distinction was found between elite core and periphery in the politically most stable municipality, which was also the one with the lowest economic diversity.     

Gorillas in the closet? Public and private actors in the enforcement of transnational private regulation

This paper examines to what extent the background presence of state regulatory capacity – at times referred to as the “regulatory gorilla in the closet” – is a necessary precondition for the effective enforcement of transnational private regulation. By drawing on regulatory regimes in the areas of advertising and food safety, it identifies conditions under which (the potential of) public regulatory intervention can bolster the capacity of private actors to enforce transnational private regulation. These involve the overlap between norms, objectives, and interests of public and private regulation; the institutional design of regulatory enforcement; compliance with due process standards; and information management and data sharing. The paper argues that while public intervention remains important for the effective enforcement of transnational private regulation, governmental actors – both national and international – should create the necessary preconditions to strengthen private regulatory enforcement, as it can also enhance their own regulatory capacity, in particular, in transnational contexts.     

Orchestrating sustainability: The case of European Union biofuel governance

This article provides an empirical analysis of orchestration – that is, the initiation, support, and embracement of private governance arrangements through public regulators – in the field of European Union biofuel governance. It examines the emerging sustainability regime and shows that orchestration has been extensively practiced. Regulators in the European Union have used a range of directive and facilitative measures to initiate and support private biofuel certification schemes and to incorporate them in their regulatory frameworks. This has given rise to a hybrid regime in which public and private approaches are closely intertwined. Discussing the benefits and complications of engaging with private biofuel sustainability governance, the article's findings point to a partial failure of orchestration in this policy area.     

Magnetic law: Designing environmental enforcement laws to encourage us to go further

The European Union has some of the world's most ambitious and highly developed environmental laws on its books, but their effectiveness is severely compromised by non-compliance. With the UNECE Aarhus Convention (1998), Europe launched an innovative legal experiment, democratizing environmental enforcement by conferring third party citizens and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) with legal rights of access to environmental information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental matters. Based on some 2000 surveys and over 150 interviews with stakeholders from three Member States – France, Ireland, and the Netherlands – we adopt a holistic, 360° perspective, capturing the views of regulated parties, NGOs, and the general public on this private governance experiment. Our data provide important new insights into the practical effectiveness of Europe's laws enabling private environmental enforcement, its (intended and unintended) effects on farmers' compliance decisions in the vital area of nature conservation, and how law might be used to stimulate pro-environmental predispositions.     

Coexistence of public and private job agencies: Screening with heterogeneous institutions

In response to the analysis of bureaucracies and the finding of inherent inefficiencies, public choice theory argues for an increase in competition by contracting out government services and deregulation. The paper explores the effect of coexisting public and private employment services in a model with private information of the worker about her ability and unobservable effort choice. The employer's use of an efficient unemployment exchange and an efficient private agency may lead to optimal screening with first best contracts. This is due to the assumption that good types of workers lose more human capital than bad types in periods of unemployment or mismatch. In contrast to standard screening contracts, a bad type of worker earns an information rent if the employment exchange is inefficient, but the employer chooses not to use the private agency for good types.     

Can private governance boost public policy? Insights from public–private governance interactions in the fisheries and electricity sectors

Based on the inductive analysis of two parallel cases of private environmental governance – private, market-driven fisheries governance and private, market-driven governance for electricity decarbonization – this paper uncovers a trigger for positive public policy spillovers from private environmental governance. It identifies circumstances that prompt groups of business actors working as private regulators to also take on a role as public policy advocates and supporters, revealing a potential for private governance initiatives that are targeted at a particular environmental problem to serve as a bolster for the public regulatory governance of that problem as well. Both private governance cases at the basis of this analysis feature groups of business actors seeking to meet voluntary sustainability goals through the tools of private governance (specifically, through flexing buyer power and private authority in an effort to reform environmentally problematic practices among particular groups of suppliers). In both cases, the business's inability to attain private sustainability goals though private governance means alone has given rise to business demand for facilitative public environmental policy and regulation. The analysis presented in this paper thus points to the occurrence of a particular and intriguing pattern of complementarity between private authority and public policy – one where public policy is called on to fill gaps left by private environmental governance and authority. And it identifies key conditions for such private-governance-driven recentering of public policy to occur, namely the presence of private supply chain greening goals and commitments that are economically, reputationally, and/or competitively critical for businesses to attain, combined with shortfalls in the capacity of businesses' private authority to bring about such attainment. The two case analysis further suggests the importance of ENGOs in identifying and activating some of the opportunities for leveraging shortfalls in private environmental governance to the advantage of public environmental policy and regulation.     

Sliding doors in Brussels: A career path analysis of EU affairs managers

This article investigates the revolving doors phenomenon in the European Union (EU). It proposes a management approach that treats this phenomenon as a form of corporate political activity through which companies try to gain access to decision makers. By using sequence analysis to examine the career paths of almost 300 EU affairs managers based in public and private companies across 26 countries, three different ideal‐typical managers are identified: those EU affairs managers coming from EU institutions and public affairs; those who make a career through the private sector; and those who establish themselves in national political institutions. This identification confirms that EU institutions need different types of information and companies need EU affairs managers with different professional backgrounds able to provide it. Rather than observing a revolving door of EU officials into EU government affairs, what the authors term ‘sliding doors’ – namely the separation of careers, especially between the public and private sectors – is discerned.     

When trade liberalization turns into regulatory reform: The impact on business–government relations in international trade politics

Business–government relations on trade issues are generally characterized as protectionist lobbying or – less often – lobbying for the liberalization of markets. However, with the evolution of the trading system, negotiations today concern not just market opening, but also the regulatory frameworks that structure international trade. This transformation has important consequences for the ways in which private interests can contribute to trade negotiations. Instead of simply trying to exert pressure, businesses and other private actors now form working relationships with governments based on expertise, learning, and information exchange. This article illustrates these new forms of public–private interactions with examples from the USA, the European Union, and Brazil.     

The secret service department: a British Intelligence Bureau in mid-Victorian London,September 1867 to April 1868

In December 1867 the Earl of Derby's government established a ‘Secret Service Department’ in London to extend Dublin Castle's anti- Fenian intelligence network to England and to contend with the perceived threat posed by domestic and international secret societies. This secret detective force – an early English intelligence bureau – lasted only until April 1868, but its disbandment reflected practical and administrative difficulties rather than a pervading prejudice towards spying. Indeed, the motivations for founding the department and the actions of those involved suggest that long before the establishment of the Special Branch in the 1880s, need rather than principle determined official actions in regard to political espionage.     

Private regulation,public policy,and the perils of adverse ontological selection

What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo-Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance's problem-solving potential and its interactions with public policy.     

Dysfunctional institutions? Toward a New Agenda in Governance Studies

There is a wide‐spread perception among academics and commentators that institutional dysfunction has become increasingly common in important social, political, and economics arenas. Opinion polls show a decline in trust and confidence in major actors and institutions, including inter‐governmental organizations, governments, firms, NGOs, and religious organizations. For some, the core of the problem is that the hitherto well‐functioning states have become less effective in aggregating and acting upon citizens' preferences. Many policy initiatives of the 1990s – deregulation, privatization, new public management, private regulation, regional integration, civil society, and so on – seemed to have failed to meet expectations. This symposium seeks to identify important theoretical and empirical questions about institutional failure, such as why do institutions fail, why are they not self‐correcting, what might be a clear evaluative yardstick and analytic approach by which to measure performance, and to what extent contemporary theories of institutional evolution and design are useful in examining institutional restructuring and institutional renewal? Symposium essays by leading social science scholars offer important insights to inform future work on institutional performance and outline an agenda for institutional renewal and change.     

Lobbying and asymmetric information

Informational lobbying — the use by interest groups of their (alleged) expertise or private information on matters of importance for policymakers in an attempt to persuade them to implement particular policies — is often regarded as an important means of influence. This paper analyzes this phenomenon in a game setting. On the one hand, the interest group is assumed to have private information which is relevant to the policymaker, whilst, on the other hand, the policymaker is assumed to be fully aware of the strategic incentives of the interest group to (mis)report or conceal its private information. It is shown that in a setting of partially conflicting interests a rationale for informational lobbying can only exist if messages bear a cost to the interest group and if the group's preferences carry information in the ‘right direction’. Furthermore, it is shown that it is not the content of the message as such, but rather the characteristics of the interest group that induces potential changes in the policymaker's behavior. In addition, the model reveals some interesting results on the relation between, on the one hand, the occurrence and impact of lobbying and, on the other hand, the cost of lobbying, the stake which an interest group has in persuading the policymaker, the similarity between the policymaker's and the group's preferences, and the initial beliefs of the policymaker. Moreover, we relate the results to some empirical findings on lobbying. qu]Much of the pressure placed upon government and its agencies takes the form of freely provided “objective” studies showing the important outcomes to be expected from the enactment of particular policies (Bartlett, 1973: 133, his quotation marks). qu]The analysis here is vague. What is needed is an equilibrium model in which lobbying activities have influence. Incomplete information ought to be the key to building such a model that would explain why lobbying occurs (information, collusion with decision makers, and so on) and whether lobbying expenses are socially wasteful. (Tirole, 1989: Ch. 1.3, p. 77, Rentseeking behavior).     

Bridging borders through institution-building: the EGTC as a facilitator of institutional integration in cross-border regions

This article examines cross-border integration at the sub-state level in the frame of a European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC). The EGTC is a supranational and directly applicable EU legal instrument that regulates the creation of cross-border ‘associations' with legal personality between public authorities. Thus, it represents a policy tool that can have an effect on the institutional frame of cross-border cooperation and potentially enhance cross-border institutional integration at the sub-state level. The aim of this article is to examine the potential effect of this EU instrument on cross-border institutional integration by studying the institutional architecture of selected EGTCs. This is done on the basis of an analytical grid that defines elements of a possible integration process based on an institutional-oriented approach. This analytical grid is applied to four case studies: the Eurométropole Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai, the EGTC Ister-Granum, the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Euroregion and the European Region Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino. The empirical analysis shows that despite the considerable improvement of the legal basis for cooperation, the possible effect of the EGTC for further institutional cross-border integration is still rather limited due to a narrow design of institutions and a low level of actor involvement.     

Europeanisation with Many Unknowns: National Company Law Reforms after Centros

Negative integration through the expansive interpretation of European market freedoms is said to undermine domestic social regulation – by vertically imposing a strictly liberal interpretation of EU rules and by pushing EU member states into horizontal regulatory competition. This article analyses domestic policy responses to one particularly prominent instance of negative integration: the CJEU’s case law on the freedom of establishment since its first landmark ruling on Centros in 1999. The analysis shows that national company laws have only converged downwards in one particular subfield – minimum capital requirements – but they remain strikingly diverse across, and increasingly within, member states on most other issues, such as workers’ codetermination rights. Legal uncertainty about the Court’s case law, the mixed economic incentives it provides for firms and political disagreement about appropriate policy responses leave considerable space for differential Europeanisation. The crisis adds to these uncertainties and thus reinforces the trend towards differentiation rather than convergence.     

The issue of instability in a simple policy game between the central bank and a representative union

In the recent economic literature the independence of the central bank is often considered to be one of the most effective guarantees to achieve price stability. A strong theoretical basis for this proposition is that the monetary policy delegation given to an independent central bank is an optimal instrument to avoid the time inconsistency problem of monetary policy. This paper investigates the stability properties of this solution in a simple game in which the private sector (i.e. the trade unions) and the public sector (i.e. the central bank) simultaneously interact. A representative monopoly union is considered, and – in line with the recent economic debate – two types of unions are investigated: (i) the standard micro-founded trade union; (ii) the inflation-averse trade union. In both cases, we find that the requirement for the Nash equilibrium to be stable imposes a limit to the conservativeness of the central bank. Instability of the Nash equilibrium reveals a strategic co-ordination failure between the public and the private sector.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Production goes global,compliance stays local: Private regulation in the global electronics industry

Poor working conditions in global supply chains have led to private initiatives that seek to regulate labor practices in developing countries. But how effective are these regulatory programs? We investigate the effects of transnational private regulation by studying Hewlett‐Packard's (HP) supplier responsibility program. Using analysis of factory audits, interviews with buyer and supplier management, and field research at production facilities across seven countries, we find that national context – not repeated audits, capability building, or supply chain power – is the key predictor of workplace compliance. Quantitative analysis shows that factories in China are markedly less compliant than those in countries with stronger civil society and regulatory institutions. Comparative field research then illustrates how these local institutions complement transnational private regulation. Although these findings imply limits to private regulation in institutionally poor settings, they also highlight opportunities for productive linkages between transnational actors and local state and society.     

The Political-Economic Dimension of Pensions: The Case of Japan

This article examines how pensions are interwoven with the public and private financial system in Japan and the consequences for pension reform. A growing literature focuses on the multifaceted ways in which pensions are interwoven with the larger political economy. This study builds on this literature and finds that (a) public and private pensions have been integrated deeply into Japan's system of developmental finance, (b) this integration has created new economic and political problems as governments have attempted to shift away from its developmental model through deregulation, liberalization, and administrative reform, and (c) because pension reform is intimately linked with these reforms, it involves addressing fundamental issues regarding the role of the state, finance, and firms. These findings collectively illustrate that pension reform is not only driven by issues of fiscal viability and benefit levels, but also by the nature of the way in which pensions are integrated into a country's system of finance.     

Representative bureaucracy and seconded national government officials in the European Commission

The bureaucratic arms of modern international organizations increasingly consist of staff with ambiguous organizational affiliations. This article analyses the implications of this trend from the perspective of representative bureaucracy – using seconded national experts (SNEs) in the European Commission (Commission) as the empirical laboratory. Using a variety of datasets, we unveil Commission SNEs' profiles (to assess their passive representativeness) and link these profiles to their role perceptions (to evaluate their potential for active representation). This illustrates that Commission SNEs' background characteristics do not match those of their constituent population (i.e. the EU27 population) – suggesting a lack of passive representativeness. However, we also find that SNEs from countries favoring stronger national rather than European regulatory and policymaking powers are more likely to see themselves as a representative of their home country government. This suggests a potential for active representation in terms of SNEs' home country's policy preferences.     

Show Them Your Teeth First!

This paper investigates the choice of an interestgroup between lobbying (``words'') and pressure(``actions'') in order to influence a policymaker. Both lobbying and pressure are modeled asstrategic means of transmitting information that isrelevant to the policymaker. However, only pressure isdirectly costly to the policymaker. The interactionbetween the interest group and the policymaker isframed as a repeated signaling game. In equilibriumpressure – in contrast to lobbying – only occurswhen the interest group's reputation is sufficientlylow, and always improves its reputation. It is shownthat (repeated) lobbying cannot completely substitutefor pressure, and that the interest group may beforced to sustain its reputation through lobbying. Weconclude that pressure is typically used to build upa reputation, lobbying to maintain a reputation.