The Institutional Politics of Structural Choice for Ministerial Departments in European Parliamentary Regimes

Many empirical scholars have suggested that political processes and structures interact and shape administrative reforms within states. However, this paper suggests that insufficient attention has been paid to setting out how specific dimensions of the political decision-making, in specific institutional contexts, actually influence organisation and structural change in European states. The paper builds on Terry Moe’s and related work on the ‘politics of structural choice’which has developed as a parsimonious account of how fundamental features of institutions in political systems have political logics that set organisational design and trends in organizational change in states.. The theory was originally developed only to study the US separation of powers system and mostly focus on federal agencies but we develop it for the institutional specificities of four European parliamentary systems and for ministerial departements. Different forms of parliamentary system have profound implications for the politics of structural choice. We examine the empirical implications of this theory against evidence that, for the first time, uses common metrics to provide a comprehensive analysis of organization change in the central states of France, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom in the period 1980 to 2014. We find utility in the political logics of structural choice, supplemented by common trends from multi-level government through membership of the European Union. The logics promote hyper-activism in organizational reform in Westminster systems, which are tempered in other European countries by institutional constraints in executive action, most notably in Germany. Periods of coalition government act as a break on change in all countries, moderating the effects of the logics of structural choice in the different political regimes.