When the cat is away: How institutional autonomy, low salience, and issue complexity shape administrative action

Abstract

Political issues sometimes display an intriguing combination of high degrees of complexity, low political saliency, and high levels of administrative autonomy. This article investigates how this type of issues shapes the relationship between politicians and the public service. More specifically, we advance the notion of “administrative action space” to describe the emergence of collaborative governance when directives from the political level are intermittent or absent. Using an illustrative case on the administration of measures to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a transnational public health issue in Europe, we find that senior public servants nested in epistemic communities play a leading role in driving agency and facilitating governance of complex but low‐salient issues when administrative autonomy is extensive.

The best laid plans?: international governance perspectives in AMR national action plans in Europe

“…The items included in the analysis followed an analytical framework on the dichotomy of horizontal and vertical coordination, based on previous research. 17 Fundamentally, these two dimensions refer to strategies for establishing and sustaining networked versus hierarchical forms of international governance. Horizontal activity refers to alignments or coordination with other EU member states, while vertical activity denotes a country’s alignment or connection with supranational actors in the AMR field like the WHO.…”

Europeisering av regionale beslutningsprosesser

“…Administrasjonene kan dermed inneha en nøkkelrolle med hensyn til å koble organisasjonene til flernivåadministrative prosesser (Carelli & Pierre, 2022). I tillegg deler fylkesadministrasjonene flere karakteristikker med direktoratene som muliggjør deltagelse i slike prosesser: For det første har det regionale nivået en viss fristilling/autonomi overfor departementene, selv om denne varierer mellom politikkområder (Jacobsen, 2020).…”

“…I den parlamentariske modellen ivaretas disse funksjonene av fylkesrådet, som er politisk 8 sammensatt og utgår fra én eller flere grupper i fylkestinget. Innføring av parlamentarisme forventes å gi sterkere politisk tilstedevaerelse og økt politisk styring, og kan lede til at fylkeskommunen i noen grad fremstår som en politisk med-eller motspiller til det rikspolitiske flertallet (Bukve & Saxi, 2014;Carelli & Pierre, 2022;Harvold, 2019, s. 40-42;Lijphart, 1999;Saxi, 2006Saxi, , 2007Winsvold & Bentzen, 2020). Dette gjør koblinger til andre politisk ledede strukturer mer sannsynlige (sentraladministrative instanser og andre fylkeskommuner), og administrative koblinger til ekstern ekspertise mindre sannsynlige.…”

Styles of regulatory discretion: A comparative analysis of the British and Israeli education legislation

“…Nevertheless, scholarly attention to regulation and delegation has largely focused on the delegation of regulatory powers to independent agencies, overlooking the manner in which delegations are granted to make secondary or delegated legislation. In recent decades, legislatures have delegated considerable rulemaking authorities to bureaucratic bodies (Carelli & Pierre, 2023; Coglianese, 2019), when designing and forming their discretion to draw up bureaucratic legislation (Levi‐Faur, 2011). While legislatures delegate powers differently (Huber & Shipan, 2002; Page, 2016; Pünder, 2009), so far, only limited research has been carried out to determine how they design their discretion to make regulation, and what the possible effects of such designs are on regulatory production.…”