Structure and Organisation of Government Project

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The research asks why some administrative organizations are created then reorganized, merged, or terminated, whereas others are seemingly 'immortal' and even can become more powerful than the elected politicians that created and control them? This question has become pertinent, especially in the past three decades, within European parliamentary democracies. By the end of the 1970s, when the golden era of welfare state expansion and state growth came to an end, a new generation of political leaders such as President Ronald Reagan of the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom initiated a series of administrative reform trajectories - privatization, deregulation, agencification, liberalization, decentralization, and New Public Management - with the aim to fundamentally alter the scope and scale of central government and sparked off several reform trajectories across the developed and developing economies. However, Western politicians who embarked on these trajectories soon found out that changing the structure and organization of their central governments was a hard nut to crack. When successful, the consequences of succeeding in reforms were often increasing fragmentation and rising coordination costs. The difficulties encountered by politicians when embarking on the road of administrative change mean that taming and changing the structure and organization of government, designing it so as to have government serve the interests of the public, is not an easy goal to reach.This project develops and applies a novel framework that will systematically map and explain organizational changes within central government cross-nationally in four European parliamentary democracies, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, over the last three decades, the period following the initiation of New Public Management reforms in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in advanced economies. The framework identifies patterns of change in and between ministries and agencies. It compares the organizational change not only between and across countries, but also within and across specific policy sectors. The framework is longitudinal as it traces organizational changes across time. This project builds upon the most influential theory of the structure and organization of central governments, which is the theory of the politics of structural choice. This theory, developed and applied within the context of the United States presidential system, claims that the structure and organization of central government is the resultant of political negotiations on the institutional design of administrative organizations between the main political actors. To be more precise, the theory argues that the structure of central government is a function of politicians' preferences for institutional designs that insulate administrative organizations from direct political control. The theory has been tested in the United States but this project analyses the machineries of central government that exist within the context of parliamentary democracies. We ask: To what extent do changes to the structure and organization of central government within European parliamentary democracies follow the same political logic as Lewis has found for the national state in the US presidential separation-of-power system? To what extent is political insulation a driving logic of administrative design? If not, what are the determinants of administrative design in parliamentary democracies and what is the role that institutions play? Can the theory of structural choice, once adapted to parliamentary democracies, explain changes - or the lack thereof - within the institutional context of parliamentary democracies?