Jörn Ege

This paper studies the impact of different coordination instruments used by local public administrations in Switzerland on policy coherence. It contributes to the special issue by demonstrating how insights from public management and public policy literatures, often working within distinct ontological frameworks, can effectively be combined to address shared challenges at the intersection of organisational structures and policy outcomes. Empirically, the paper focuses on a mutually relevant topic of state action: the role of administrative coordination in fostering coherent policy implementation. Using data from two recent surveys of local governments in Switzerland, we examine which coordination instruments are employed within a municipality and assess their impact on policy coherence using regression analysis. We find that the more coordination instruments used in a municipality, the higher the policy coherence. Further, while hierarchical, network- and market-based coordination instruments all display a significant positive effect on coherence, network-based instruments are most effective. By integrating theoretical insights and empirical evidence from two distinct and often disconnected debates, our study not only advances the understanding of various intra-organisational coordination instruments and their effects on policy coherence but also contributes to the broader discourse of the special issue. It demonstrates how insights from different academic disciplines can be combined to address shared challenges at the intersection of public management and policy implementation research.

This study focuses on street-level managers’ (SLMs) compliance with COVID-19 measures in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Israel, in order to better understand their role during policy implementation. Responsible for the direct delivery of public services, street-level organizations serve as the operational arm of the state in general and as the frontline of government policy in times of crisis. SLMs who occupy the top managerial tier within their organization are understudied, although they exert a significant influence on everyday public life. The data comprise 399 “compliance stories” based on interviews with managers in nurseries, schools, health care and welfare offices, police stations, and care homes. Using “codebook thematic analysis,” we identify various levels of (non)compliance and several prominent explanatory factors that shape (non)compliance. Data show that even when asked about particularly challenging measures, managers reported that their organization had been noncompliant (either full or partial) in only about a quarter of the stories. Three influences emerge as primary barriers to compliance—a lack of resources, managers’ relationships with clients, and the perception of the measure’s effectiveness. Emphasizing that SLMs often act as local policy entrepreneurs using their discretion to solve problems and serve the public, our findings further demonstrate the crucial role they play in shaping the face of the government for the people.

Hierarchical accountability often proves insufficient to control street‐level implementation, where complex, informal accountability relations prevail and tasks must be prioritized. However, scholars lack a theoretical model of how accountability relations affect implementation behaviors that are inconsistent with policy. By extending the Accountability Regimes Framework (ARF), this paper explains how multiple competing subjective street‐level accountabilities translate into policy divergence. The anti‐terrorism “Prevent Duty” policy in the United Kingdom requires university lecturers to report any student they suspect may be undergoing a process of radicalization. We ask: what perceived street‐level accountabilities and dilemmas does this politically contested policy imply for lecturers, and how do they affect divergence? An online survey of British lecturers (N = 809), combined with 35 qualitative follow‐up interviews, reveals that accountability dilemmas trigger policy divergence. The ARF models how street‐level bureaucrats become informal policymakers in the political system when rules clash with their roles as professionals, citizen‐agents, or “political animals.”

International public administrations (IPAs) are growing in number and workforce. But are they meaningful actors in their own right? And if so, what makes them so? To put this discussion on a more systematic basis, we consider it most important to look at the autonomy of international secretariats, as we consider bureaucratic autonomy the precondition for a lot of phenomena that might be interesting when studying international bureaucracies. Without evidence, however, that they have autonomy, there would be little reason to follow any other research question related to them. Research in international relations (IRs) has indeed long neglected the autonomous role of IPAs. Yet the central puzzle underlying this endeavor is the observation that international organization’s (IO’s) capacity to act independently from their members is a central precondition for them to effectively address global policy problems (Haftel and Thompson, 2006; Reinalda and Verbeek, 2011; Hooghe and Marks, 2015). It has been well established that this independence depends to a great extent on the existence of an autonomous IPA (Tallberg, 2000; Trondal, 2008; Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2013). Yet we do not know how the bureaucratic autonomy beyond the nation state can be conceptualized and empirically studied.

Although a consensus has emerged that international public administrations (IPAs) wield independent influence over the development and implementation of public policies (Reinalda and Verbeek, 2006; Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2009a; Nay, 2012; Skovgaard, 2017; Stone and Moloney, 2019), the questions of to what degree and under which precise conditions such influence occurs are still debated (Eckhard and Ege, 2016). Open questions remain as to how bureaucratic influence beyond nation-states might be defined and reliably observed and how the insights gained so far can feed into the construction of a more general theory of bureaucratic influence in emerging international and transnational governance configurations.

This study investigates how configurations of bureaucratic autonomy, policy complexity and political contestation allow international public administrations (IPAs) to influence policymaking within international organizations. A fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 17 policy decisions in four organizations (FAO, WHO, ILO, UNESCO) shows that all IPAs studied can be influential in favorable contexts. When policies are both contested and complex, even IPAs lacking autonomy can influence policy. If either complexity or contestation is absent, however, it is the variant of autonomy of will that helps the IPA exploit procedural strategies of influence. Low autonomy of will, among other factors, explains why IPAs cannot exert influence. Conversely, the variant of autonomy of action appears largely irrelevant. The study provides new insights into the role of bureaucracy beyond the state, exemplifying how research of bureaucratic influence can yield more systematic results in various empirical settings.

This article studies how different systems of policy advice are suited to provide relevant knowledge in times of acute crisis. The notion of evidence-based policymaking (EBP) originated in the successful 1997 New Labour program in the United Kingdom to formulate policy based not on ideology but on sound empirical evidence. We provide a brief overview of the history of the concept and the current debates around it. We then outline the main characteristics of the policy advisory systems in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy through which scientific knowledge—in the form of either person-bound expertise or evidence generated through standard scientific processes—was fed into policy formulation processes before the COVID-19 crisis. Whereas EBP takes place in the form of institutionalized advisory bodies and draws on expertise rather than on evidence in Germany, the system in Switzerland focuses more on the use of evidence provided through external mandates. Italy has a hybrid politicized expert system. The article then analyzes how this different prioritization of expertise vs. evidence in the three countries affects policymakers’ capacity to include scientific knowledge in policy decisions in times of acute crisis. The comparison of the three countries implies that countries with policy advisory systems designed to use expertise are better placed to incorporate scientific knowledge into their decisions in times of acute crisis than are countries with policy advisory systems that relied primarily on evidence before the COVID-19 crisis.