Publications
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Policy advice from bureaucracy KU Leuven
Policy advice is a core function of modern bureaucracies. It can be distinguished from closely related concepts such as policy design, policy analysis and policy work – all of which are also conducted by the civil service. Civil servants remain critical advisory actors in the policy advisory system despite the fact that it latter has become more crowded and competitive. The bureaucracy is well placed to provide political executives with both ...
Representative Bureaucracy and the Role of Expertise in Politics Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The vast majority of existing studies on bureaucratic representation focus on bureaucracies’ permanent and internal staff. Yet, the rising sophistication of modern democracies and the technocratization of political life are gradually inducing an increased reliance on external experts to assist in the development and implementation of policy decisions. This trend, we argue, raises the need to extend studies of bureaucratic representation to such ...
John Stuart Mill on Civil Service Recruitment and the Relation between Bureaucracy and Democracy KU Leuven
Abstract As a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganisation in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate ...
Architectures of bureaucracy : an architectural and political history of ministerial offices in Belgium, 1915-1940 Ghent University
Bureaucracy and authoritative control in contemporary legacy news media companies: A Weberian analysis of a Flemish case study Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Autonomy is considered a prerequisite for the press to function in service of the public. Over the past few decades both news organizations and society at large have been subjected to significant change and instability, potentially affecting journalists’ independent modes of production. We argue that a re-evaluation of journalism’s institutional strength to perform the societal functions bestowed upon it by the public is imperative. In this ...
On the Bureaucracy of Bureaucracies: Analyzing the Size and Organization of Overhead in Public Organizations KU Leuven University of Antwerp
Governments across the globe try to re-balance their budgets by rationalizing overhead operations. When overhead-reducing policies are adopted, it is important to understand why some central government organizations have a higher overhead than others, and why organizational models to produce overhead efficiencies are used to different extents. This study focuses on the Flemish context to analyze differences between central government ...
Research Handbook on Street-Level Bureaucracy. The Ground Floor of Government in Context KU Leuven
When the objectives of public policy programmes have been formulated and decided upon, implementation seems just a matter of following instructions. However, it is underway to the realization of those objectives that public policies get their final substance and form. Crucial is what happens in and around the encounter between public officials and individual citizens at the street level of government bureaucracy. This Research Handbook addresses ...
Wages in the Indian Bureaucracy. Can Kautilya’s Arthasashtra Provide an Answer? KU Leuven
We compare the wage structure of the Indian bureaucracy with the wage structure recommended by the Arthashastra, a treatise on economics and politics written by Kautilya, the advisor to the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta during the fourth century B.C. As compared to Kautilya’s recommendations, the wages in the Indian bureaucracy are highly egalitarian and far lower than those recommended by Kautilya. It is likely that the existing wage structure ...
A Public Service Gap: Capturing contexts in a comparative approach of street-level bureaucracy KU Leuven
Studies of street-level bureaucracy have introduced a variety of conceptualizations, research approaches, and causal inferences. While this research has produced several insights, the impact of variety in the institutional context has not been adequately explored. We present the construct of a public service gap as a way to incorporate contextual factors and facilitate comparison. This construct addresses the differences between what is asked of ...