European integration is under pressure. At the same time, the notion of a European administrative space is being explicitly voiced. But does a shared idea of the public servant exist in Europe?
This volume shows how the public servant has been conceived throughout history, and asks whether such conceptions are converging towards a common European administrative identity. It combines conceptual and institutional history with political thought and empirical political science.
Sager & Overeem's timely analysis constitutes an original effort to integrate history of ideas and cutting-edge survey research. It presents the subject's ideational foundations as well as its modern manifestation in European administrative space.
Sager & Overeem's excellent collection is the first serious exploration of the historical and comparative development of the public servant in Europe. The result is a superb set of essays that are historically insightful and of contemporary relevance. Scholars and practitioners will benefit from learning of the historical roots of the often competing concepts of public service and democratic legitimacy that still inform so much of contemporary practice. -- Mark Bevir, University of California Berkeley
From the ashes of the second world war, the European Union emerged as, ultimately, a moral experiment. But can today's EU of 28 nations and 400 million people from immensely diverse cultures transcend the traditional nation-state and all its historic limitations? Many factors will decide the answer. Among the most critical is the EU's capability to forge its own public administration expertise, corporate identity, and ethical commitment to carry out effectively its policy agendas. This book attempts to examine that fundamental yet often neglected problem confronting Europe's future. While no simple or clear-cut conclusions can be found in these pages, the book's contents open intriguingly diverse perspectives and raise key research questions on a seminal public issue that deserves priority attention for those who wish the EU experiment success. -- Richard Stillman, University of Colorado
This volume puts the European civil servant centre stage. It offers disciplined, insightful comparisons across time and space and reveals converging trends towards a shared European administrative identity. The lucid chapters are coherently assembled and fill a gap in the literature. An important contribution to the debate about the European administrative space. -- Michael W Bauer, Deutsche Universität fur Verwaltungswissenschaften
Dr Patrick Overeem is an assistant professor at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he specialises in political and administrative theory, with a special interest in public ethics. For his doctoral dissertation (2010; published 2012), he studied the constitutional rationale for disentangling politics and administration in modern states. Articles have been published in Public Administration Review, Administration & Society and Administrative Theory & Praxis. His current research concerns constitutional legitimacy, virtue-ethics (especially MacIntyre’s), statesmanship, and the political implications of value pluralism. He teaches courses on political philosophy, administrative ethics, public values, and the philosophy of social science.
Professor Fritz Sager is a political scientist specialising in administrative studies and theory, policy research and evaluation, organisational analysis, and Swiss politics. His research has been published in the Public Administration Review, Governance, Public Administration, Regulation & Governance, Policy Sciences, Policy & Politics, Political Studies, West European Politics, the Journal of Urban Affairs, the American Journal of Evaluation, Public Money & Management, Evaluation, and the Public Management Review among others. In 2010, he won the Marshall E Dimock Award for the best lead article in the Public Administration Review during the volume year 2009. His current research regards knowledge utilisation in direct democracy, positioning strategies of secondary capital cities, and bureaucratic behaviour in policy implementation and in policy failure.
Julia-Carolin Brachem is a research assistant at the German Centre for Research on Higher Education and Science Studies, Hannover, Germany. She completed her MA in European Studies at the University of Osnabrück in 2010, though part of her MA studies were spent at Sciences PO Grenoble. From 2010 to 2011 she worked as a management assistant in a consulting company, and from 2011 to 2012 as a researcher in social sciences methods at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Since 2012 she has been a researcher at the German Centre for Research on Higher Education and Science Studies in Hannover. She is currently completing a PhD on teachers’ resignation tendency and its potential explication through competence profiles and education policy conditions.
Bernadette Connaughton is a lecturer at the Department of Politics and Public Administration of the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Gerrit Dijkstra is an assistant professor at the Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Niels Hegewisch is a research assistant at the Institute for History, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University, Greifswald, Germany.
Karin Hilmer Pedersen is an associate professor in Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science and Government, University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Pascal Hurni is a PhD candidate at the Center of Competence for Public Management, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Lars Johannsen is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Céline Mavrot is a research assistant at the Center of Competence for Public Management, University of Bern, Switzerland. She is a political scientist, currently completing her dissertation on the history of French administrative sciences, under the Swiss National Science Foundation project The Normative-Analytical Divide in 20th-Century Public Administrative Thought: A History of Ideas of American and Continental European Administrative Science.
Joanne Paul is a lecturer at the New College of the Humanities, London.
Jos CN Raadschelders is professor of public administration at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University, where he serves as the associate director for faculty development. He is also affiliated with the Institute of Public Administration, University of Leiden. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. His research interests include history of government, comparative government, civil service systems, and epistemology of public administration.
Christian Rosser is research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Constance. Prior to this, he was managing director of the Executive MBA at the University of Zurich. He is a political scientist specialising in political and administrative theory, and the recent and modern history of administrative ideas. His research has been published in Public Administration Review, Public Administration, Administration & Society, and Administrative Theory and Praxis.
Mark R Rutgers is a professor of Philosophy of Public Administration in the Department of Political Sciences, University of Amsterdam.
Koen Stapelbroek is an Academy of Finland Senior Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki and Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2004) and published Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and a range of articles and edited volumes on European eighteenth-century political thought. He is finishing a monograph on European perceptions on Dutch political economic reform and starting up comparative research on the regulation of international trade and European integration in the eighteenth century.
Gayil Talshir is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Markus Tepe is a junior professor at the Center for Social Science Methodology, Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany.
Caspar van den Berg is an assistant professor at Leiden University Institute of Public Administration. His wrote his PhD on the implications of European integration on the civil service systems of the UK, France and The Netherlands, for which he received the Van Poelje Prize for the best dissertation in the fields of Public Administration and Policy Sciences in the Netherlands and Flanders in 2013. He was a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2013-2014 and a visiting professor in Comparative Public Governance at Tallinn University of Technology in 2014-2015. His current research is a cross-national comparative project financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) on the causes and consequences of senior civil service politicisation.
Frits van der Meer is a professor in Comparative Public Sector and Civil Service Reform at Leiden University.
