Structure and Organisation of Government Project

The research asks why some administrative organizations are created then reorganized, merged, or terminated, whereas others are seemingly 'immortal' and even can become more powerful than the elected politicians that created and control them? This question has become pertinent, especially in the past three decades, within European parliamentary democracies. By the end of the 1970s, when the golden era of welfare state expansion and state growth came to an end, a new generation of political leaders such as President Ronald Reagan of the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom initiated a series of administrative reform trajectories - privatization, deregulation, agencification, liberalization, decentralization, and New Public Management - with the aim to fundamentally alter the scope and scale of central government and sparked off several reform trajectories across the developed and developing economies. However, Western politicians who embarked on these trajectories soon found out that changing the structure and organization of their central governments was a hard nut to crack. When successful, the consequences of succeeding in reforms were often increasing fragmentation and rising coordination costs. The difficulties encountered by politicians when embarking on the road of administrative change mean that taming and changing the structure and organization of government, designing it so as to have government serve the interests of the public, is not an easy goal to reach.
This project develops and applies a novel framework that will systematically map and explain organizational changes within central government cross-nationally in four European parliamentary democracies, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, over the last three decades, the period following the initiation of New Public Management reforms in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in advanced economies. The framework identifies patterns of change in and between ministries and agencies. It compares the organizational change not only between and across countries, but also within and across specific policy sectors. The framework is longitudinal as it traces organizational changes across time. This project builds upon the most influential theory of the structure and organization of central governments, which is the theory of the politics of structural choice. This theory, developed and applied within the context of the United States presidential system, claims that the structure and organization of central government is the resultant of political negotiations on the institutional design of administrative organizations between the main political actors. To be more precise, the theory argues that the structure of central government is a function of politicians' preferences for institutional designs that insulate administrative organizations from direct political control. The theory has been tested in the United States but this project analyses the machineries of central government that exist within the context of parliamentary democracies. We ask: To what extent do changes to the structure and organization of central government within European parliamentary democracies follow the same political logic as Lewis has found for the national state in the US presidential separation-of-power system? To what extent is political insulation a driving logic of administrative design? If not, what are the determinants of administrative design in parliamentary democracies and what is the role that institutions play? Can the theory of structural choice, once adapted to parliamentary democracies, explain changes - or the lack thereof - within the institutional context of parliamentary democracies?

A set of government policy makers in the central agencies responsible for the organisation of the public sector in the four countries , France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom , will directly benefit from this research. In the UK, these bodies include the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury and policy teams of the major departments that have strategic interests in the organisation of public sector activity. The findings will also be of interest to central government departments with interests in the four policy areas we examine. Beyond the executive, the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, which has conducted inquiries into changes in the structure of government in recent years, has commented in reports on the inadequacy of evidence about their effects, a gap in knowledge that this project plans to fill. The findings will also be of interest to policy think tanks who have ongoing interests in the topic, notably the Institute for Government based in London. Benefits will accrue to organisations in other countries , especially those with similar parliamentary government structures, and to international organisations, notably the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate. This Directorate's mission is to help member state governments improve governance and respond to societal and economic challenges and it will have an interest in our evidence about organisational structure and policy outcomes.
We will communicate our research findings by informing regularly on intermediary research results on our website, e.g. with an online publication of shorter 'Research Notes' for a practitioner audience and by actively encouraging professionals to comment on our research, including a project blog on our website. We will also circulate findings to the specific beneficiaries noted above who will also be participants in our interview programme which will facilitate communication of our findings later on.
The main benefits from this research to these groups will be of two kinds. First, the bringing together of evidence about the development or organisation in the central government of four major EU member states using a common systematic framework of analysis will enable basic factual comparative questions to be answered. It will identify trends and assess whether there have been convergences in structures over time and trace whether similar forms have been used in the different countries at different points in time. At a second level, when the use of these structures are related to the success of policies for the four policy areas considered, the study this will enable the central agencies and other policy makers to improve their learning about the consequences of organisational structure and reform. The four policy areas of climate change, financial services regulation, employment policy and austerity policies, are all of high contemporary salience to policymakers. Employment policy and austerity policy are long running concerns of the national state, climate change and financial services regulatory policies pose relatively new and urgent challenges. The findings will enable potential models that could be adopted across countries to be identified. Prior to the proposed research, the systematic study of the structure and organization of central government and its relationship to policy outcomes has been largely absent in prevailing studies on national administrative systems within European parliamentary democracies