Summary:

Faced with a variety of unprecedented societal challenges such as terrorism, climate change, and pandemics, the traditional epicentre of decision-making - the nation-state - is increasingly reliant on its bureaucratic supplement, the administrative state, to ensure viable, long-term solutions. Concomitantly, as the world grows closer, so do national administrative institutions by frequently engaging in policy-making both within and across levels of government. Consequently, public policy is initiated, shaped, and implemented at the intersection of national and international levels of government. National administrations, particularly national agencies, serve as administrative bridges between international and national politics and contribute to coordinate policy agendas and outcomes. At the abstract level, this has been conveyed as the emergence of common political orders and has given rise to a (re-) new(ed) set of questions: how can we conceptualize and explain political orders? What are the mechanisms and consequences of integration of states and their administrations? To what extent do new patterns of multilevel cooperation supplement or challenge the nation-state?

This Ph.D. thesis confronts these questions by addressing the impact of organizational factors in the public governance process. The theoretical point of departure examines the explanatory power of organizational characteristics to account for how integration impacts public governance and political orders more generally. The study thus aims to contribute to organizational scholarship more broadly by testing and building on established causal relationships. The empirical impetus for this project lies in the institutional interconnectedness that characterizes public administrations. Specifically, the study investigates how the supranational locus for policy-making integrates into domestic structures. The study thus follows in the footsteps of established scholarly approaches focusing on the national-supranational nexus and adopts two classical questions: (i) how do organizational factors affect governance processes generally, and (ii) how do supranational institutions influence decision-making processes within domestic public administration particularly? Methodologically, the study is quantitatively driven (large-N questionnaire data) supplemented with qualitative data (semistructured interviews).

This thesis consists of two parts: part I comprises the synopsis with six chapters, while part II collects three independent studies that each address different aspects relating to the aforementioned research questions. The study makes both theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions. Theoretically, it adds to organizational scholarship by testing and building on established variables. Empirically, it offers a study of the Norwegian central administration encompassing 47 agencies and 16 ministries (2016). Methodologically, it contributes a large-N study of national officials combined with a mixed-methods approach. The main novelties introduced include: firstly, a study on ministerial officials over a time period of two decades (article I); secondly, a study of the relationship between secondary organizational affiliations and actor-level identities among agency officials (article II); and finally, a study of the effects of ‘institutional overlaps’ in domestic inter-organizational relationships on agency autonomy in practicing of EU legislation (article III).

A key observation of this thesis regards the self-reinforcing administrative bias fueled by organizational properties and moreover, how sectoral cleavages are sustained by a series of interconnected processes. Article I showcases how organizational variables at the domestic level bias how supranational policies and steering signals are received and processed. It also shows that these processes intensify over time. Article II finds a causal link between participation in secondary structures, such as advisory boards or expert committees, and identity shifts, and that this shift is particularly evident in supranational secondary structures. Article III reaffirms the role of organizational duplication and illustrates how this may affect how supranational policies are processed and steered from the (national) agency level.