The Multilevel Administrative State and the Future of Public Administration Research

The administrative state, originally coined by Dwight Waldo, emphasizes the distinct role of public administration in democratic governance. Yet, public administration research has insufficiently theorized and probed how administrative structures at one level of government may be consequential for public governance at another level, and thus how shifting features of the administrative state may coexist with multilevel administrative governance. The paper theorizes how the contemporary administrative state has transcended its mere domestic role in democracy, and how future research should focus on how public administration is embedded in multilevel administrative systems. Departing from the invitation and lessons of Waldo, the study theorizes how ways of organizing the administrative state at one level of government (e.g., at the European Union level) may bias ways of making public policy across levels of authority (e.g., at the national level).