The Maintenance of Executive Capacity in Germany: Revisiting the Annual Budget of the European Union

This article considers the executive capacity of the German government to coordinate the annual budget of the European Union in the post-Maastricht period. It identifies and elaborates two broad sets of factors essential to the development of this routinized policy process: internal executive coordination through specialized administrative techniques and coordination with external actors through multi-level institutional adjustments. The emergent picture shows the success of the Federal government in maintaining its executive capacity within an Europeanized policy sector.