'SUPRANATIONALISM' IN QUESTION: BELIEFS,VALUES, AND THE SOCIALIZING POWER OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION REVISITED

Do international organizations affect the views of the people who work for them? Although increasingly sophisticated methods have been used to address this question, disagreement persists about whether the beliefs of staff are formed before they join, after they enter the institution, or are shaped by instrumental calculation. Drawing on an original dataset based on the first fully representative survey of the European Commission's workforce, this article breaks new ground by putting different definitions of ‘supranationalism’ to the test and by capturing multiple ways in which individuals may be affected by the experience of working for the organization. For the first time, it demonstrates that commitment to ‘supranationalism’ varies between Commission staff groupings, that the influences on belief vary with the measure of ‘supranationalism’ used, and that both post‐recruitment experience and pre‐recruitment roles play a part in shaping beliefs.     

PLAYING THE TRANSPARENCY GAME: CONSULTATION AND POLICY-MAKING IN THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION

The recent unveiling of a package of measures designed to make the work of the European Commission more‘transparent’is part of a wider effort to make EU decision-making more open and accessible. Yet, the Commission's transparency package was designed above all to cope with its chronic management problems. These include rigid lines of division between different spheres of the Commission, the strong loyalties of policy-concerned Directorates-General (dg s) to their specific‘clientele’, unclear rules governing access to information, and intense rivalries between dg s and the private offices of individual Commissioners. This article dissects the transparency package and uses case study material to highlight ways in which the transparency initiative seeks to provide antidotes to the Commission's management problems. It offers an early assessment of the transparency package's impact and examines the prospects for reform of the Commission under Jacques Santer.     

THE FIGHT OVER DANISH NATURE: EXPLAINING POLICY NETWORK CHANGE AND POLICY CHANGE

The policy network approach is widely recognized for its ability to describe different networks. Adding the concepts ‘policy image’ and ‘cleavage in the party system’ makes it possible to explain policy network change as well as policy change. This argument is supported by a comparison of the Danish decision in 1960 to straighten Denmark's largest river, the Skjern River, to gain farmland, and the 1987 decision to restore the river and recreate the wild nature of the river valley. The fight over Danish nature has historically been a fight between a land reclamation network and a nature protection network – two networks trying to promote different policy images. Coupled with a new (environmental) cleavage in the party system, new policy images connected to the Skjern River decisions led to radical policy changes.     

EUROPEAN COMMISSION OVERLOAD AND THE PATHOLOGY OF MANAGEMENT REFORM: GARBAGE CANS,RATIONALITY AND RISK AVERSION

Prior to the EU resignation crisis (the fall of the Santer Commission in 1999), it had long been argued that the European Commission was suffering from managerial ‘overload’. The incoming Prodi Commission embarked on a programme of administrative and managerial reform under the leadership of Commission Vice President, Neil Kinnock. Central to this programme were the objectives of improving managerial capacities and bolstering legitimacy in order that the Commission would be better able to discharge its expanded responsibilities. Using the model of governmental overload developed in the 1970s and 1980s, this article quantifies the impact of the reforms and argues that the overload problem has been aggravated rather than diminished. In this context, the rationale of the reform project is explored with reference to theories of public policy decision making.     

DEFYING THE COMMISSION: CREATIVE COMPLIANCE AND RESPECT FOR THE RULE OF LAW IN THE EU

This article investigates how and to what extent member states comply with EU obligations in terms of process and outcome. The aim is to demonstrate how norm‐conform behaviour unfolds, or fails to unfold, in an interaction between a member state and the European Commission. The empirical focus is on recent rule of law crises in France, Hungary and Romania. The argument is that member states engage in symbolic and/or creative compliance, designed to create the appearance of norm‐conform behaviour without giving up their original objectives. The cases illustrate that creative and symbolic compliance strategies may be successfully employed by member states because they enable the Commission to disengage from conflicts it judges too costly and yet maintain its credibility, and are conditioned by the visibility of failure to change facts on the ground. The implication is that, at times, not only is compliance symbolic, but also to some extent is enforcement.     

POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION: ONE MORE TIME IN THE FRYING PAN

As an academic discipline, public administration has reached yet another fork in its evolutionary road. Earlier milestones have posed choices during the discipline's unfolding. In this century emphases have shifted in turn from civil service reform to scientific management, then to human relations and decision making. As the century closes, the discipline acknowledges some intellectual debt to each of these foci. The traditional debate about what kinds of ties suffuse policy/politics and administration now reflects a new uncertainty—the meaning of administration itself. Is there anything analogous among the public, private, and not-for-profit contexts in which administration transpires? Are there substantive or procedural considerations within these various contexts of policy making that influence, and in turn are influenced by, administrative participation in the policy process? If so, what is the nature of such influence, and what are its consequences?     

THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE SECTOR CLEAVAGE REVISITED: THE IMPACT OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT ON POLITICAL ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOUR IN 11 WEST EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

This study explores a refined model of public/private sector cleavage voting. Assuming that market and work experiences are crucial for people to develop common political views, it investigates three contexts that shape government employees' willingness to vote as a single constituency: the branch of public sector production, the occupational status, and the type of service economy. Estimation results obtained from regressions on European Social Survey (ESS) data indicate that government employees in public health, education and service production rather than public administration utilize sector cleavage voting. Regardless of their actual occupational status, public health and education employees show persistently stronger attitudes in favour of expanding state responsibility. With respect to party choice, stronger signs of alignment along the sector cleavage are observed in Social Democratic service economies. In sum, the public/private sector cleavage continues to matter in a more complex way than a simple sector dichotomy would suggest.     

The European Union and Post-9/11 Counterterrorism: A Reappraisal

In spite of the hectic activity subsequent to the so-called month of transformation in the wake of 9/11, it is not to be taken for granted that the European Union is the right vehicle in Europe for the combating of terrorism. The lack of the EU's executive powers with respect to regulating the behavior of member states relative to a common threat such as terrorism, raises the fundamental question of whether the Union itself, as opposed to its constituent members, or an alternative multilateral forum, is an appropriate body for effectively confronting terrorism in Europe.     

Misjudging Islamic Terrorism: The Academic Community's Failure to Predict 9/11

Most academic experts within the International Relations (IR) community and other, more specialized disciplines, failed to predict or warn government policymakers and the public of the possibility that events of 9/11 magnitude could take place on the U.S. homeland. Given that long-term investigation of trends in world affairs is one of the sources that has always informed policy analysis, this represents an interesting question to examine. The analysis contained in this assessment suggests that the ontological, methodological, and conceptual problems within and between the disciplines, combined with a skewed absorption with the prospect of developments in Asia, created a gap in the knowledge about Islamic terrorism and groups like Al Qaeda, which in turn caught most of the academic community unaware on 9/11. This article performs a quantitative study to determine the nature and scope of this apparent analytical failure on the part of academics in IR and other specialized disciplines to predict 9/11 and aims to address why this failure took place.     

LEARNING FROM PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK: PERFORMANCE INFORMATION,ASPIRATION LEVELS,AND MANAGERIAL PRIORITIES

While performance management is increasingly widespread, we still know little about how performance information generates learning and affects organizational responses. Recent work on performance information and learning in private business organizations, however, suggests that perceived negative performance triggers important strategic responses related to problem identification, search, and change. In turn, how performance is perceived depends on whether performance falls short of aspiration levels that are based on an organization's historical performance and the performance of peer organizations. This article adapts this model to a public sector context and tests one implication of the model, namely that public managers will increase their prioritization of goals that are currently performing below aspirations. This question is central to the study of public organizations pursuing multiple and democratically contested goals. Empirical findings based on administrative performance data and a survey of Danish school principals support this prediction.     

EXPIATING EVIL: REFLECTIONS ON THE DIFFICULTIES OF CULTURAL,ORGANIZATIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL REPARATION

Evil actions by human beings show little sign of diminution as the twenty‐first century unfolds. Evil can be defined as the knowing infliction of pain and suffering – physical and/or psychological – on another human being. It can be perpetrated by individuals, by organizations, and by nation states, among others. It can take the form of administrative evil, in which people participate in acts of evil while thinking they are just doing what they should be doing in their organizational role. Under conditions of moral inversion, evil can be engaged in under the guise of doing good. While some aspects of evil’s aftermath are clear enough through the trail of mass graves, broken bodies and lives, and trans‐generational reverberations, the possibilities of expiating evil, including administrative evil, through processes of forgiveness, reconciliation and reparation, especially on the part of organizations and states, remain under‐explored. This article begins that exploration.     

“9·11”事件后美国公共外交研究的争论与进展

自从“公共外交”这一概念提出以来,它便作为国家对外政策研究的一个重要方面受到广泛关注。冷战期间,美国公共外交,“作为美国向其他国家宣传美国生活的一种方式”,发挥了重要作用。然而,随着冷战的结束,公共外交这一传统角色逐渐失去了意义,并“消沉”一段时间,直到“9·11”事件之后,公共外交再次成为政界和学界讨论关注的焦点。