Leadership, Institutions and Enforcement by Slobodan Tomić

Author:Slobodan Tomić
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319975832
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Discussion

The analysis reveals that the transition from the Committee to the Agency was accompanied by a major shift in the enforcement style. While the Committee’s pattern of enforcement was consistently zealous, the Agency’s enforcement pattern featured a considerable proportion of non-zealous actions, coupled with political selectivity; the former’s de facto autonomy was high and the latter’s – low.

What does this tell us about the impact of the organisational and leadership changes, which accompanied the start of Agency’s work? First, the evidence clearly contradicts the institutional logic: Despite the slightly increased legal independence, Agency’s de facto autonomy decreased. Second, since the observed turn from high to low de facto autonomy took place in a context of increased resources, the findings are at odds with the core tenet of the resource-based view (RBV). The analysed cases, therefore, contradict the two organisational theories that were set out in Chap. 2.

Yet, how can these observed deviations from the ‘insulation logic’ be explained? While the analysis of the rhetorical patterns hints that the answer relates to the different drivers of the Agency Director and Agency Board to act assertively, it is hard to pinpoint precisely the factor that drove the Agency Director to offer a more favourable treatment to ruling officials. Since the high insulation from political bodies rules out the fear of statutory reprisal as an explanation, the remaining possibilities are that: (a) the Director was biased towards the ruling coalition; or/and (b) that politicians influenced her work through informal networks, a route through which the constraints set by the formal institutional framework can be circumvented. These, hypothetical, possibilities can hardly be proven, though they have been observed as common in Serbian politics and feature in the study’s anecdotal evidence and stakeholders’ testimonies.

The first variant above, which is more benign, implies some sort of Director’s identification with the political agenda of the ruling coalition. For instance, she might have preferred the EU orientation of the ruling coalition over the pro-nationalist agenda of the opposition. With their history of civil activism in the anti-Milošević movement in the 1990s, many senior civil servants that were appointed in the post-2000 Serbia held strong preferences regarding the core cleavage in Serbian politics, namely that between the old and new regime (the regime that ruled before 2000 vs the post-2000 regime). While the Agency Director was not known as an active member of the civic movement in the 1990s (EU-orientation can roughly be identified as the leading idea of the post-2000 regime), it cannot be ruled out that she nonetheless held strong preferences over the question of the country’s pro-EU orientation, particularly given the socialising effect of Agency’s interactions with international actors.

Regarding the second possible explanation, Serbia offers a conducive environment to politicians to informally pre-mediate the decisions of civil servants. Even when the staff of an arm’s length body is nominated during the appointment process by non-partisan actors, i.e. independent bodies, these nominating bodies can nonetheless be susceptible to the influence of political actors as a result of both ‘softer’ and ‘harder’ forms of political patronage over the public sector.

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