The Many Politics of Structural Choice and their Effects. Understanding Changes in the Organization of Western European Governments

Abstract

Both by systematic administrative reform and through periodic ad hoc measures, governments have continually modified the structures of their public administrations. Initiatives include promoting specialization through the creation of new directorates and agencies on one hand, combating excessive organizational fragmentation through mergers or by advocating integrated organizations on the other. By these means and others, those in power have sought to “manipulate the machine” (Pollitt, 1984) or to shake up state architectures by “playing” with the “building blocks” (Hood, 1986) of the various organizations that make up ministries. Organization has always been a vital tool of government (Downs 1967; Wilson 1989) and intervention into administrative architectures, for those in power, has become a technique of government in itself: March and Johan P. Olsen claim that organizational reform now constitutes a public policy in and of itself (“the policy of comprehensive reform”) while Hood considers political action on the organization as one of four instruments employed in the exercise of power. In the US context, political scientists like Terry Moe (1990) have emphasized the crucial place of the “politics of structural choice” in governmental activities. However, the politics that traverses reorganizations is not the product of a single rationality. It refers to a large set of relations, especially the electoral field, the bureaucratic field, the clients of public policy and experts and their expertise. The decisions made about the structure and organization of central governments reveals a great variety of political issues, like distributing power, determining how decisions and rules are made, monitoring the decisions of administrative organizations, insulating some organizations from political interferences, sending signals to policy or partisan clienteles, developing new policy expertise and addressing policy issues, obtaining better policy results, reaffirming the steering of the bureaucratic state. Yet, while crucial, these various political rationales over the organizations of bureaucracies are under-examined. Relatedly, much remains to be known about the effects of organizational changes on the way these political issues are handled and the policy outcomes that result. Drawing on the key theoretical perspectives of structural choice to policy attention dynamics, path dependency or coalition governance, this panel proposes to examine the multiple political dimensions of the politics of structural choices and their effects. It sets out the interactions between administrative structural changes and political rationales (especially electoral, partisan constitutional, policy-oriented and governance logics). It gathers a collection of papers that explore the various political issues of the reorganizations of structure and organization of Western European governments and considers their effects on central political issues like policy integration, steering capacities and strategic autonomy.