“Let's organize”: The organizational basis for stable public governance

Abstract

This study carries two distinct contributions to extant litera-ture. Theoretically, it introduces an organizational approachto the study of public governance. Empirically, it demon-strates how the organizational architecture of governmentrepresents a stable and systemic capacity for public gover-nance across time. The study establishes how stabilityserves as an enduring feature of public governance andhow this is anchored in theorganizational architectureofgovernment systems. Moreover, structured flexibility isillustrated by how the civil service adapts to both interna-tional organizations and societal stakeholders. Theorizingthe organizational dimension of public governance, thisstudy also introduces adesign toolthat may be useful for delib-erately (re)structuring public governance. Empirically, thesearguments are probed by a sizable dataset with 13,173 obser-vations across 40 years, consisting of nine surveys of civilservants at ministry and agency levels. The data enables along-term perspective on government civil servants overnearly half a century, thus allowing for a comprehensive studyof the organizational basis for public governance.