Complex environmental issues have to date mostly been addressed by administrative means such as regulation, impact assessment, and planning that harness expertise in institutions such as pollution control agencies and resource management bureaucracies. Administrative rationalism is defined as the problem-solving discourse that emphasizes the role of the expert rather than the citizen or producer/consumer in social problem solving. Experts can be scientists, social scientists, or policy analysts who can deploy techniques such as cost-benefit analysis and risk analysis. Recent variations on the discourse involve evidence-based policy making and ‘nudge’. Administrative rationalism figures more strongly as an institutional style in some political systems than in others. The chapter focuses on the United States, as it pioneered many of the practices of administrative rationalism in environmental policy, and China, where administrative rationalism now finds its strongest application. Administrative rationalism is in crisis as its limits when confronting complexity become exposed, and it is arguably giving way to more networked and less hierarchical governance.
Chapter
4. Leave It to the Experts
Administrative Rationalism
Book
British Politics provides an introduction to British politics with an emphasis on political science to analyse the fundamental features of British politics, and the key changes post-Brexit. Part A looks at constitutional and institutional foundations of the subject. Chapters in this part look at leadership and debating politics and law creation. The second part is about political behaviour and citizenship. Here chapters consider elections, the media, agenda setting, and political turbulence. The final part is about policy-making and delegation. The chapters in this part examine interest groups, advocacy, policy-making, governing through bureaucracy and from below, delegating upwards, and British democracy now.
Chapter
8. Governments and bureaucracies
Wolfgang C. Müller
This chapter examines the decision-making modes of governments and their capacities to govern, with particular emphasis on bureaucracies that support governments in their tasks of ruling and administrating the country. It first presents the relevant definitions before discussing different modes of government that reflect the internal balance of power: presidential government, cabinet government, prime ministerial government, and ministerial government. It then considers the autonomy of government, especially from political parties and the permanent bureaucracy, along with the political capacity of governments, the relevance of unified versus divided government, majority versus minority government, and single-party versus coalition government. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the technocratic capacities of government, focusing on issues such as classic bureaucracy, the politicization of bureaucracies, and New Public Management systems.
Chapter
8. The European Commission:
the cabinets and the services
Frédéric Mérand
Focusing on the services and the cabinets, this chapter analyses the European Commission as a complex organizational, political, and social institution. Organizationally, it describes the Commission as a unique international bureaucracy which puts its French administrative tradition, consensus-based, and law-heavy internal procedures under the growing influence of an Anglo-American style of management. Politically, the chapter shows that the Commission increasingly behaves like a political executive that seeks to establish its own legitimacy vis-à-vis public opinion and member states by addressing partisan dynamics in the European Parliament. In terms of social relations, the chapter draws from the author’s ethnographic work to explore the transnational life of Commission civil servants and cabinet staffers who have made the Berlaymont their home.
Chapter
11. The European Council and the Council of the European Union
Jeffrey Lewis
This chapter examines the components that constitute the Council system: the European Council and the Council of the EU. Together, these institutions form the part of the Union that unabashedly represents national interests in the European integration process. The EU Council is a site of intense negotiation, compromise-building, and at times acrimonious disagreement among the member states. The EU Council is not a single body, but a composite of national officials working at different levels of political seniority and policy specialization. From the heads of state and government to the ministers, down to the expert-level fonctionnaires (officials), the EU Council and the European Council embed governments of the EU into a networked club of collective decision-making that penetrates into the national capitals and domestic politics of the member states. In authority, scope, and procedural methods, the Council system represents the most advanced, intensive forum of international cooperation between sovereign nation states in the modern world.
