The Politics of International Bureaucracy: Bridging Theoretical Perspectives from International Relations and Public Administration

Recently, the emerging literature on international public administrations (IPAs) has turned to discuss more strongly how to conceptualize the role of international bureaucracies from a public administration perspective (Bauer, Knill and Eckhard 2017). Hence, concepts such as bureaucratic autonomy, administrative behavior and the politics-administration nexus have come under renewed theoretical scrutiny in the context of IPAs. Against this backdrop, we seek to discuss the basic assumptions of key theoretical perspectives in international relations and public administration scholarship and the promises and pitfalls of a stronger attention to and utilization of this theory diversity for enhancing our empirical analysis of international bureaucracies. From an international relations perspective, the interest in IPAs reflects the shift of research on whether International Organizations (IOs) matter towards more in-depth analyses of how they matter for global governance by looking within the IO (e.g. Johnson 2014). The prevailing opinion in the discipline remains, however, that international relations theories and concepts are individually insufficient for the study of IPAs (Biermann 2017). Instead, it is argued that an analytical framework is needed which bridges perspectives from principal-agent theory and sociological institutionalism to address questions of the bureaucracy’s influence on the performance of an IO. From a public administration perspective, Christensen and Yesilkagit (2018) propose to rely stronger on the public service bargain (PSB) approach to situate the theoretical arguments in empirical IPA analyses more firmly into public administration scholarship and to acknowledge more strongly the politics of (and in) international bureaucracy. Yet, some basic assumptions hardly hold for IPAs, there is not one minister but multiple principals and the bureaucracy as bargaining partner is not as permanent since it operates with a rotation principle. More importantly, other classic public administration concepts such as should be revisited to ascertain their explanatory strengths for IPA analyses. In sum, this paper aims (1) to compare the premises and assumptions of key theoretical concepts in international relations and public administration to find points of potential bridging, (2) to discuss the mechanisms of 'theory bridging', differentiating between prioritizing, complementing, contrasting, and synthesizing, and (3) to ascertain the avenues forward and an analytical framework bridging these theoretical perspectives for future IPA analyses.