European Integration and Consensus Politics in the Low Countries by Hans Vollaard & Jan Beyers & Patrick Dumont

Author:Hans Vollaard & Jan Beyers & Patrick Dumont [Vollaard, Hans & Beyers, Jan & Dumont, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Political Process
ISBN: 9780415659796
Google: SF_plAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 17242659
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Institutional reforms and external advice seeking

The wave of NPM-style reforms which started in the Anglo-Saxon world in the late 1970s–early 1980s, reached the European continent by the early 1990s. Encouraged by international organizations such as the European Union, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the IMF (International Monetary Fund), and the World Bank, the Netherlands too reformed its public sector in a number of ways, including the privatization of its state-owned enterprises, the creation of executive agencies, at arms-length, of smaller central ministries, and a focus-shift towards regulatory governance (see Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011; Van der Meer et al. 2012).

In addition to these structural reforms, the 1990s also saw several reforms of the advisory system. These reforms were designed to make way for “independent expertise” as the guiding principle of the advisory system. The dominant function of the advisory system soon became the provision of expertise, rather than the channeling and voicing of societal interests. Members of advisory committees were increasingly selected by politicians and civil servants because of their expertise rather than their representative function of a given interest group or constituency (Oldersma et al. 1999).

Administrative reforms and reforms of the advisory system were designed to generate an expert-driven advisory system as well as a more outward-oriented civil service. We first examined whether this position of the civil service is reflected in the relevance of various external actors that civil servants reported to have on their work. Of the respondents included in the SCS survey, 67 percent considered national parliament to have become increasingly relevant, next to the media (66 percent), ministers (63 percent), the European Commission (55 percent), citizens (51 percent), and domestic interest groups (49 percent). Regional and local governments were to a lesser extent considered to have become more relevant (33 percent), as well as ministerial advisors (27 percent), and the European Parliament (19 percent); only 8 percent considered consultancy firms to have become more relevant for their work. These figures indicate a strong re-orientation towards political principals, including the European Commission, rather than towards external advisory bodies.

Of these external advisory bodies, interest groups are clearly more relevant for civil servants than other advisory bodies. On average, 60 percent of the respondents in the SCS survey indicated that they have interacted with between one and five advisory councils, consultancy firms, universities, and research organizations over the preceding years. For interest groups, in contrast, only 28 percent indicated to have interacted with between one and five of such groups, while 10 percent indicated to have interacted with between eleven and fifteen of them, and 32 percent to have interacted with more than fifteen of them. Of all external advisory bodies mentioned, interest groups are clearly the most relevant ones.

In addition to the width of sources consulted, the two main reasons for bureaucracies in consensus systems to seek external advice – to obtain expertise and to seek political support – were evaluated. Respondents were asked to list their main motivations – among others, the need for

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