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West European Politics

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Governance as a Path to Government

Klaus H. Goetz

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2008

To cite this Article Goetz, Klaus H.(2008)'Governance as a Path to Government',West European Politics,31:1,258 — 279
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 West European Politics,
Vol. 31, Nos. 1–2, 258 – 279, January–March 2008

Governance as a Path to Government

KLAUS H. GOETZ

During the 1970s, analyses of state and government in Western Europe were
preoccupied with crises of governability and legitimacy. The early 1980s witnessed
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sharply differing responses to these crises, exemplified by the socialist experiment in

France and Thatcherism in the UK. By the end of the 1980s, ‘governance’ – in both
national and European arenas – began to be regarded as the dominant institutional
response to problems of governability. Considered from the perspective of comparative
European government, the oft-claimed shift from government to governance appears
overstated. Governance is less widespread and consequential both at national and
European levels than its proponents suggest, as a survey of the propellants, conditions
and national and European constellations of governance shows. Viewed historically,
governance does not so much indicate a shift from government as towards government,
as the core institutions of the state build up capacity to deal authoritatively and
hierarchically with new governing challenges.

Thirty years ago, at the time of the launch of West European Politics, the
academic discussion of state and government in Western Europe was
preoccupied with crises of governability, overload and legitimacy (the chief
contributions are summarised succinctly in Kaase and Newton 1995: 17ff.
and Birch 1984). Critics of both the left and the right agreed that the
contemporary state was faced with ever-growing demands for the provision
of services and benefits, which it was unable to meet. Analysts from the left
pointed to a fundamental contradiction between the need for the democratic
state to legitimate itself in the eyes of the voters through extensive service
provision to be paid for through taxation; and the demands by capital to
secure the highest possible returns. This theme, with variations, ran through
the work of O’Connor (1973) on the Fiscal Crisis of the State, Offe (1972) on
the Structural Problems of the Capitalist State, and Habermas (1973) on the
Legitimation Crisis. Not only did the contradictory demands of capital and
the mass of the population overstretch the state’s capacity to deliver; the
more the state’s structural inability to meet the demands of both capital and
the citizens at the same time became apparent, the more its popular
legitimacy eroded.

Correspondence Address: khgoetz@uni-potsdam.de

ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01402380701835066
 Governance as a Path to Government 259

Writers from conservative and liberal perspectives likewise highlighted the

disparity between the demands placed on the state and its ability to satisfy
them, making the business of government increasingly difficult, if not
eventuating in a state of ungovernability. King (1975: 286), in his analysis of
government overload, argued with reference to the British example that,
first, ‘the range of matters for which British Governments hold themselves
responsible – and for which they believe that the electorate may hold them
responsible – has increased greatly over the past ten or twenty years, as well
as over the past fifty, and is still increasing at a rapid rate’; second, ‘just as
the range of responsibilities of Governments has increased, so, to a large
extent independently, their capacity to exercise their responsibilities has
declined’ (King 1975: 288). Brittan (1975: 129), acknowledging King’s
contribution to his own analysis, noted that the two ‘endemic threats’ to
liberal representative democracy: ‘the generation of excessive expectations’
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and ‘the disruptive effects of the pursuit of group self-interest in the market
place’ (ibid.: 129) led to an ‘excessive burden (. . .) placed on the ‘‘sharing
out’’ function of government (. . .) defined as the activities of the public
authorities in influencing the allocation of resources, both through taxation
and expenditure policies and through direct intervention in the market
place’ (ibid.: 130).
As Offe (1979) noted, there was much common ground between left and
right in the analysis of problems of governability and legitimacy: ‘There are
a number of structural similarities between neo-conservative state and social
theory, which centres on the problem of ‘‘ungovernability’’, and the socialist
critique of late capitalist societal formations, which, understandably, neither
side is keen to highlight’ (Offe 1979: 294, my translation, KHG). Writers
from different ideological perspectives offered stark warnings about the
future. Brittan (1975: 155), for example, addressed the possibility that liberal
democracy might disappear through a ‘gradual process of disintegration of
traditional political authority and the growth of new sources of power.
Indeed, a continuation of present trends might lead to a situation where
nothing remained of liberal democracy but its label’. Crozier (1975: 53),
writing at the same time, acknowledged that ‘The problems of European
societies are difficult to solve but they are not intractable’; but he also
suggested that crises from within and without could quickly lead to a
situation in which ‘the whole European system would crumble’ and a
‘disastrous drifting of Western Europe’ might occur (ibid.: 54).
It is within this context of a widely shared sense of fundamental malaise
and even pessimism about the prospects of democracy that detailed analyses
of the conditions under which Western governments might go bankrupt
(Rose and Peters 1979); of challenges to political authority through lack of
effectiveness and popular consent (Rose 1980); or of the possible waning of
the welfare state (Scharpf 1977) were undertaken. There were, of course,
also cautiously optimistic voices, such as Kaase (1980: 190), who argued
that ‘political beliefs, attitudes and behaviours threatening ungovernability
 260 K. H. Goetz

have not become clearly visible’. But the overall picture was one of gloom
and, in some instances, doom.1

Crisis of Governability? Governance to the Rescue

Against this background of profound scepticism, the late 1970s and early
1980s witnessed sharply differing political responses to the widely perceived
need for reform. In these responses, the lines between institutional reforms,
focused on state and government, and policy reforms – the substance and
instruments of public policy – were naturally blurred. The extremes were
France, at one end, and the UK, at the other. In both, new incoming
governments aimed at a rupture with past state and policy traditions. In
France, the election of a socialist president and a parliament with a left-wing
majority in May–June 1981 brought in a government intent on radical
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reform, which included, in particular, an ‘extension of the public industrial

sector’ through large-scale nationalisation, ‘greater state control over
credit’, ‘an expansionary budgetary stance’, ‘an active industrial policy’, ‘a
renovated planning system’, ‘a democratization of decision-making at plant
level’, and ‘a decentralization of the decision-making process’ (Machin and
Wright 1985: 2). The ‘crisis’ of the state was, thus, to be tackled through
state expansion (nationalisation, budgetary expansion, growth in public
sector personnel, reinvigoration of state intervention in the economy) and its
internal reconfiguration, notably through administrative and political
decentralisation (Mény 1984, 1987).
The other extreme was marked by the reforms pursued by the Thatcher
government in the UK, which had come into power in May 1979 on a
Conservative manifesto

generally regarded as the most ideological of the party’s post-war

manifestos (. . .) What the manifesto proposed included a shift towards
monetarist policies as a means of controlling inflation, a reduction in
the proportion of GNP taken in taxation and, above all, shifting the
balance of society towards individual freedom and away from the tilt
in favour of the state. (Douglas 1983: 69–70)

Combined with a policy of rigorous centralisation (Goldsmith and Newton

1983) and an onslaught on the power of the trade unions (Hague 1983), the
UK’s reform agenda constituted almost a mirror image of the French
ambitions.
Neither case was, however, typical of Western European developments
more broadly. In West Germany, the coming into power of Chancellor Kohl
in late 1982, despite the proclaimed aim of a Wende (turnaround), did little
to alter the main contours of the stable ‘West German model’ (Paterson and
Smith 1981), whether in terms of state structures or state–society relations
(Benz and Goetz 1996). Italy, although often regarded as a prime example of
 Governance as a Path to Government 261

the twin crises of governability and legitimacy (Tarrow 1979; Graziano and
Tarrow 1979), seemed to be ‘in transition’ at the end of the 1970s (Lange
and Tarrow 1979) and continued to be in ‘crisis and transition’ two decades
later (Bull and Rhodes 1997), but with little evidence, at least until the end
of the 1980s, of any profound transformative ambitions amongst its ruling
classes. Moreover, neither country pursued a policy of aggressive privatisa-
tion (as in the UK) or nationalisation followed by later privatisations, as in
France (Vickers and Wright 1988).
With a focus on the reforms of the state and policy-making machinery, it
seems, at least at first sight, paradoxical that in Europe the concept of
governance first rose to prominence in analyses of the UK’s political system.
This occurred at a time when observers noted state centralisation – within
the British central government and in intergovernmental relations – an
ideological drive to shrink the state, and a determined attempt to minimise
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the role of organised interests in public policy-making. In reviewing his

earlier work on policy networks – ‘sets of organizations clustered around a
major government function or department’ – Rhodes (2003: 65) noted that
the Thatcher government’s intention to use the market to deliver public
services had the unintended effect of increasing the role of policy networks.
Thus, the corporate management and marketisation reforms:

fragmented the systems for delivering public services and so created

pressures for organizations to cooperate with one another to deliver
services. In other words, and paradoxically, marketization multiplied
the networks it was supposed to replace (. . .) Fragmentation not only
created new networks but it also increased the membership of existing
networks, incorporating both the private and voluntary sectors (. . .) In
short, governance refers to the changing role of the state after
the varied public sector reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. (Rhodes 2003:
65–6)

The driving forces behind the spread of governance were, of course, not
uniform across Western Europe (see below). As far as developments at
national level are concerned, chief factors commonly associated with the
spread of governance arrangements include privatisation (Vickers and
Wright 1988), which was one, though by no means the sole, factor behind
the rise of the ‘regulatory state’ (Majone 1999; Lodge 2008); administrative
reforms inspired by the New Public Management (Pollitt and Boukaert
2004; Wright 1994; Müller and Wright 1994a,b); and changes in
intergovernmental relations and territorial politics (Keating 2008; Rhodes
and Wright 1987). In the European context, the emergence of ‘multi-level
governance’ (Hooghe and Marks 2001, with references to their earlier work)
or ‘European governance’ (for an extensive review see Kohler-Koch and
Rittberger 2006) were seen to reflect the extension of the powers of the
European Union; the close interaction between public and private actors at
 262 K. H. Goetz

EU, national and subcentral levels in the EU policy process; and the
concomitant progressive Europeanisation of national political systems
(Goetz and Hix 2000).
It is scarcely surprising that there are many different conceptualisations of
governance, as the concept has been used for different heuristic purposes
and in diverse disciplinary and sub-disciplinary contexts (for reviews see,
e.g., Benz 2004; Kjær 2004; Schuppert 2005). As far as comparative
European government (and public administration) is concerned, most
proponents of the concept would probably agree with Benz and
Papadopoulos (2006a: 2–3) on the following ‘major traits of governance’:
‘plurality of decision centres’; ‘no clear hierarchy’ between these centres; ‘the
core of decision structures consists of networks’; the boundaries of decision
structures are fluid and defined primarily in functional terms; actors include
experts, public actors and representatives of private interests; collective
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actors dominate; ‘negotiation prevails’; and ‘governance usually leads to less

formal modes of decision-making’ (quotations partly emphasised in the
original). Benz and Papadopoulos also emphasise that amongst actors
‘Elected politicians are deemed to play a secondary role’ (ibid.: 3) and in
‘governance the initiative and control functions of parliaments are expected
to be weak, with parliaments instead being confined to the role of ratifying
bodies’ (ibid.: 3). In common with many other analysts, these authors stress
the link between governability and governance, when they note that to ‘to
avoid ungovernability, the plurality of competing interests and preferences
has to be organized through ‘‘horizontal’’ coordination and cooperative
policy-making cutting across institutions, sectors and territories’ (ibid.: 2).

Governance as Practice: The Challenge of Comparative European

Government
What are the problems with governance that this article seeks to highlight?
It would be facile to criticise what might appear as the inflationary use of the
term or the fact that there are many different definitions to be found (though
the latter certainly means that it is easy to dismiss any critique as being ‘off
target’). Similarly, there is not much to be gained from belabouring the
obvious point that governance is not an integrated theory. It is certainly
theory-applying, with prominent contributions from both rationalist and
sociological-institutionalist perspectives, and, similar to the concept of
Europeanisation, its main value may lie in serving as an ‘attention-directing
device’ (Olsen 2002). Finally, it scarcely advances our understanding of
either government or governance to ask whether the latter exists. Rather, my
purpose here is to probe the oft-made claim that the past two decades or so
have seen a decisive shift from government to governance.
The argument developed in the following can be briefly summarised as
follows. Considered from the perspective of comparative European
government, governance as a practice is less widespread and less
 Governance as a Path to Government 263

consequential than talk about a major shift suggests. The propellants of

governance are distributed unequally across the EU-27; the conditions upon
which governance relies are in short supply in much of Europe; there is little,
if any, evidence of weakened core executives, a downgrading of elected
politicians and the progressive marginalisation of parliaments in the policy
process; and neither EU policy-making nor Europeanisation provide
compelling evidence of a strengthening of governance at the expense of
government. Since governance as a concept is neglectful of political power, it
is ill-positioned to capture how governments establish new needs for
government intervention and build up institutional capacity – often in the
face of fierce societal opposition – to deal authoritatively and hierarchically
with these newly-identified needs. Viewed from this perspective, evidence of
governance, which certainly exists, is not an indication of a shift away from
government; rather, it signals a shift towards government, as problems and
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decision-making authority move from the societal to the state sphere.

Propellants of Governance
The forces that Rhodes (1996, 2003) and others have identified as propellants
behind the rise of governance show a great deal of cross-national variation.
This observation applies not only to the fragmenting effects of decentralisa-
tion, regionalisation and federalisation (Keating 2008), but also, and in
particular, as regards the extent to which states have undergone adminis-
trative reforms that tend to be summarised under the label of the New Public
Management. This NPM reform agenda has been linked to institutional
fragmentation; regulation; competition within the public sector and between
the latter and the private sector (e.g. privatisation, deregulation, market-
isation, contracting out); hands-on management; management by objectives;
output orientation; and customer orientation (Wright 1994).
Some commentators go as far as to suggest that NPM may now be
intellectually ‘dead’ (Dunleavy et al. 2006), as its problematic side effects,
‘radically increased institutional and policy complexity’, have become more
apparent, and NPM-inspired reforms are halted or even repealed. But
although this may be an overstatement, comparative analysis shows
convincingly that NPM has affected the EU-15 with very unequal force.
Pollitt and Boukaert (2004), who have undertaken the most detailed
comparative examination of public management reforms (including six
European and four non-European countries), highlight the extent to which
‘reform trajectories’ have differed across nations as regards the scope and
the major components of reform – including finance, personnel, organisa-
tion, performance measurement systems – and processes of implementation.
A very similar conclusion is also reached in the recent comparative
exploration of NPM practice by Pollitt et al. (2007), which highlights cross-
European diversity in NPM practice, whether it concerns the use of
performance indicators, personnel reforms, the creation and management of
 264 K. H. Goetz

executive agencies, public–private partnerships, benchmarking and evalua-

tions of the reforms.
For example, there is a great deal of cross-national variation in the degree to
which governments have delegated tasks to non-majoritarian institutions,
such as regulatory agencies, and the degree of independence, if any, which
these enjoy (Thatcher and Stone Sweet 2002). Where, as in the UK,
autonomisation through the setting up of agencies (‘agencification’) initially
appeared to go very far, this seems to have been followed by a reassertion of
the central Westminster bureaucracy (Richards and Smith 2004). Indeed,
Christensen and Lægreid (2005) identify a more general dynamic where
deregulation and agencification are followed by reregulation and a ‘reasser-
tion of the centre’. Even where, as, for example, in Norway, NPM reform has
been influential and there has been major structural devolution – Christensen
(2005: 728) notes that during ‘the last 15 years, about 60 units have changed
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their organisational status and become formally more autonomous’ – state

and administrative traditions have proved highly resilient. Thus, Norway
continues ‘to have many of the features of the centralised state model, such as a
hierarchical political-administrative system, a relatively large public sector,
and structural homogeneity’ (ibid.: 736).
When one turns to the ten new Central and Eastern European member
states of the European Union, it is noticeable that post-communist
administrative reforms have not been inspired by the NPM. In fact, as a
World Bank expert noted towards the end of the 1990s, the CEE countries
‘have stayed curiously clear of the NPM approach. The implicit systems and
models adopted so far have been the centralized hierarchies of the Weberian
tradition’ (Nunberg 1999: 264). Later comparative analyses (Goetz 2001;
Dimitrov et al. 2006, Meyer-Sahling 2004) have arrived at similar
conclusions. This is not to suggest that strong central executives and
administrations modelled on Weberian principles have taken deep root in
post-Communist contexts; but nor has Central and Eastern Europe proved
a fertile ground for the kind of state reforms that in Western Europe were
seen as key drivers behind governance.

Conditions of Governance
Analysts of governance with a disciplinary background in comparative
government (and public administration) typically recognise that governance
cannot supplant government, but is, in fact, critically reliant on the latter.
To set up state-government and governance in opposition to each other is,
from this perspective, fundamentally misleading. This point of view is
exemplified in the work of Pierre and Peters (2000). For them, the emergence
of new patters of governance

should not necessarily be seen as indications of a weakening of the

state but rather a transformations of previous models of governance
 Governance as a Path to Government 265

into new ones (. . .) it is much too early to dismiss the state as a centre
(if not the centre) of power and authority . . . Thus, the main issue is
not so much whether the state is declining but rather how it transforms
and what contending sources and models of governance seem to be
emerging. (Pierre and Peters 2000: 94; emphasis original)

Elsewhere, they have noted that in ‘retrospect it appears that if parts

of the governance debate have attempted to move the state back out of
governing into the relative oblivion it found itself during the heyday of
the ‘‘behavioural revolution’’ (. . .) We believe that this movement is
unfortunate, simply because it is an implicit argument that the state has
lost empirical leverage’ (Peters and Pierre 2006: 29; emphasis original). In
particular, the core institutions of the state – law, executives, parliaments,
courts – are critical in empowering and authorising governance. Even
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strong proponents of the governance paradigm acknowledge that political

institutions ‘define who is authorized to act and make collectively binding
decisions, they make actors’ behaviour predictable and visible, and they
link those who hold power to those who are subject to decisions’ (Benz
and Papadopoulos 2006a: 4). The oft-invoked image of the ‘shadow of
hierarchy’ as a necessary precondition of governance captures this point.
Governance is then state-dependent; it is also society-dependent in the
sense that in order to work governance arrangements rely on the capacity of
private interests to organise themselves effectively as collective actors. For
public–private networks to function, private collective actors must, thus, be
highly institutionalised, have considerable resources at their disposal and,
crucially, must be seen as legitimate interlocutors for political actors.
Clearly, these conditions are distributed very unequally across Europe, even
if the analysis is restricted to the EU-27. Where state capacity is often seen
as weak, organised civil society is typically also considered to be
comparatively less developed. Thus, it has been pointed out that Southern
European (Cassese 1993; Featherstone 2005; Sotiropoulos 2004) and
Central and Eastern countries (Goetz 2001) suffer from administrative
deficits, which have, amongst other things, been linked to their compara-
tively poor record in implementing EU law (Falkner et al. 2004); that
organised civil society is less developed in these parts of Europe than in
North-Western and Northern Europe; and that institutionalised coopera-
tion between political actors and collective private actors is less extensive
and intensive.
Recent work on the implementation of EU environmental policy in both
Southern and Central and Eastern Europe highlights this mutual
dependence as the key reason for the ‘only limited evidence for the
emergence of new modes of governance in the accession process. If at all, we
find nascent forms of cooperation between state and non-state actors that
hardly go beyond consultation’ (Börzel 2007: manuscript). Where, as in the
 266 K. H. Goetz

cases of Southern Europe and Central and Eastern Europe, both state and
society are comparatively weak, governance is unlikely to emerge. Thus,

state capacities have often been too limited to cast a credible shadow
of hierarchy providing sufficient incentives for non-state actors to
cooperate. Moreover, state actors that command only limited
resources have been themselves reluctant to cooperate with non-state
actors for fear of agency capture. Finally, weak states are mirrored by
weak societies – like state capacities, the degree of societal organiza-
tion is significantly lower in Southern Europe and Central and Eastern
European (CEE) countries compared to the liberal democracies in
North Western Europe. (ibid.)
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Consequences of Governance
So far, the argument developed here suggests that outside the North-
Western core of Europe both state and society have provided much less
fertile grounds for the emergence of governance than proponents of a ‘shift’
from government and governance assume. But even if one restricts the
analysis to those parts of Europe where governance could be expected to
flourish, it becomes evident that central trends associated with the rise of
governance – notably the weakening of central authority, the margin-
alisation of elected (executive) politicians, and a loss of power for
parliaments in the policy process – find little support in mainstream
comparative European government.2 The fact that these alleged conse-
quences of governance have failed to materialise does not in itself suggest
that governance arrangements do not play a central part in public policy-
making; but it does cast doubt on the direction of the shift that many
authors allege to have taken place. It supports the argument that
governance complements or supplements government or, as is argued here,
often leads towards government rather than away from it.

A weakening of central authority? Proponents of governance often assume

that there has been a ‘hollowing out’ of the state, evidenced by ‘a loss of
capacity at the heart of the state – in the core executive’ (Saward 1997: 17)
and that this process also affects political leadership, notably chief
executives, who are in danger of ending up wearing a ‘hollow crown’
(ibid.). With reference to the British core executive, Rhodes (2003: 69) has
described this alleged ‘hollowing out’ as follows:

The state has been hollowed out from above (e.g., by international
interdependence), from below (by marketization and networks), and
sideways (by agencies). Internally, the British core executive was
already characterized by baronies, policy networks, and intermittent
 Governance as a Path to Government 267

and selective coordination. It has been further hollowed out internally

by the unintended consequences of marketization which fragmented
service delivery, multiplied networks, and diversified the membership
of those networks (. . .) Externally, the state is also being hollowed out
by membership of the European Union and other international
commitments.

Curiously, this assessment runs counter to the argument put forward by

Peters, Rhodes and Wright (2000: 7) in the context of a comparative study
of core executives, where it is argued that ‘over the last thirty to forty years
there has been a steady move towards the reinforcement of the political core
executive in most advanced industrial countries and, that within the core
executive, there has been an increasing centralization of authority around
the person of the chief executive – President, Prime Minister or both (as in
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France)’. More recently, Webb and Poguntke (2005: 21) have argued that
Europe is experiencing a ‘structurally induced presidentialization’ of its
politics, which reflects ‘the growth of leadership power and autonomy
within parties and political executives, and the greater prominence of leaders
in electoral processes’ (Webb and Poguntke 2005: 336). Surprisingly, given
the emphasis by some influential writers on the importance of governance in
the UK, the same country is also often regarded as a prime example of
centralisation, giving rise to a ‘British presidency’ (Foley 2000). The
evidence to support such statements is certainly open to question (see Goetz
2006); but comparative research into Western European governments and
central ministerial administrations provides little evidence to support the
notion of a ‘hollowed out’ central authority.

A marginalisation of elected politicians? In stark contrast to the expectations

of proponents of governance, several recent comparative explorations of the
relationships between elected politicians and their officials in Europe have
found evidence of determined attempts by politicians to (re-)gain control
over officials and to reassert their authority over the bureaucracy (Page and
Wright 1999, 2007; Peters and Pierre 2004). Whilst in the 1960s and 1970
it was fashionable to warn against the dangers of ‘technocracy’ and
‘government by experts’, since the 1980s scholars have increasingly stressed
the (re-)politicization of public policy-making. Amongst other develop-
ments, scholars have highlighted that executive policy-making has taken on
an increasingly top-down character, as politicians and partisan advisors set
policy priorities, with a much reduced scope for bottom-up bureaucratic
leadership; that the sources of external policy advice in the forms of think-
tanks and consultancies have multiplied, leading to an erosion of the
erstwhile near-monopoly of the senior civil service in the provision of policy
advice; that there has been a ‘deinstitutionalization or personalization of
political trust’ in the relationship between political and bureaucratic elites
(Page and Wright 1999: 277), which means that ‘officials have to develop
 268 K. H. Goetz

closer personal ties with political masters by acquiring political craft and
confidence’ (ibid.: 278); and that public management ‘reforms meant to
weaken the role of political leaders have resulted in greater political
intervention in the day-to-day management of government’ (Peters and
Pierre 2004: 284).
Germany provides a prime illustration of the reassertion of political
control. In a classical analysis of the German federal policy process
published by Renate Mayntz and Fritz W. Scharpf (1975) some 30 years
ago, they noted a pronounced weakness of political planning and control.
As a result, a bottom-up policy process characterised by ‘considerable
decentralization’ (ibid.: 67) predominated, with departmental ‘working
capacity (. . .) almost entirely concentrated at the lowest hierarchical level’
(ibid.: 64), i.e. the section:
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It is obvious that the sections, the basic operating units of

departmental organization, work out the proposals for new programs
in detail. There is little institutionalized capacity for this work
elsewhere in the department, and neither the departmental executive
nor the divisional leadership are able to participate very actively in the
drafting of proposals. In addition, however, the sections also play an
important role in initiating policy proposals. In fact (. . .) most policy
proposals in the federal departments are initiated by the sections, if by
initiating we mean not simply to utter an idea but to decide that a
more or less clearly conceptualized policy goal shall be transformed
into a proposal for a new program or program change, and to sit down
oneself to start work on it or direct somebody else to do so. (ibid: 67)

Thirty years later, on the basis of both own research and a review of the
more recent literature, Goetz (2007a: 185) has argued that

it is difficult to avoid the impression that top-down control rather than

dialogue has gained the upper hand. The progressive erosion of the
ideational foundations of civil service autonomy; organisational
change in the ministerial administration; the growing strength of co-
governing actors; and the proliferation of external sources of policy
advice directed at the political executive have combined to curb the
scope for policy leadership at the sectional level of the administration,
in particular. The traditional decentralised, bottom-up policy process,
with the expert civil servant at the its core, has been gradually replaced
by a top-down process in which the civil service aides the preparation
of, and executes, decisions taken elsewhere.

Thus, changes in Germany’s federal policy process appear to have followed

a path that Mayntz and Scharpf warned against 30 years ago: ‘a more
hierarchical, top-down model of executive control over policy-making’
 Governance as a Path to Government 269

(Mayntz and Scharpf 1975: 105), in which officials are the recipients of
political directives rather than participants in a ‘dialogue’ (ibid.: 100ff.) with
the political leadership. Comparative research (Page and Wright 2007)
underlines that this development has been paralleled in other Western
European countries.

A loss of parliamentary power? The third shift in institutional power that

Benz and Papadopoulos associate with governance concerns the reduction
in the policy-making powers of parliaments. Debates about the decline of
the parliament do, of course, long precede the governance debate; but they
have acquired a new momentum under the banner of the alleged rise of
‘post-parliamentary’ forms of democracy. Although the concept was already
in use some 30 years ago – note the subtitle of Richardson and Jordan’s
(1979) book on ‘governing under pressure’ – it has gained greater
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prominence in mainstream comparative politics and comparative public

policy over the last decade or so.
Again, however, scholars specialising in the study of parliaments seem
much more optimistic about their power and influence than students of
governance and have pointed to a reassertion of legislatures in public policy-
making in countries as diverse as Norway (Rommetvedt 2005), Austria
(Crepaz 1994) or Portugal (Leston-Bandeira 2001). In countries such as
Italy, where the legislature has traditionally had a strong influence over
policy, the growth in prime ministerial power does not appear to have led to
a major weakening of parliament’s policy-making function (Newell 2006).
This is not to argue, of course, that Western European legislatures do not
differ greatly in their policy powers (Norton 1990) or that formally increased
powers translate easily into increased policy control (Raunio and Wiberg
2008). But it seems difficult to sustain the argument that the rise of
governance has led to a decline in the policy-making functions of
parliaments.

Europeanisation
Over the last decade or so, the impact of European integration, mostly in the
form of the European Union, on domestic politics, government and public
policy has emerged as a central concern in comparative political science
(Goetz and Hix 2000; Goetz 2007b; Graziano and Vink 2007, Green Cowles
et al. 2001; with further references). As concerns the impact on the core
institutions of the state, this literature allows for no clear conclusions
regarding the impact of integration on governance (for a detailed review
that highlights the contradictory empirical findings see Goetz and Meyer-
Sahling 2008, with full references). Thus, the argument that integration
strengthens executives at the expense of parliaments and private interest
groups co-exists side by side with accounts that reject the thesis of a
progressive deparlamentarisation and even with the suggestion that
 270 K. H. Goetz

integration might have been a driving force behind the ‘reparlamentarisa-

tion’ of the member states’ political systems. Whilst some authors argue
that within national executives integration strengthens the administration
at the expense of political decision-makers (‘integration promotes bureau-
cratisation’), others point to the growing involvement of national
politicians in EU-related decision-making and a progressive restriction of
bureaucratic discretion. Similarly, one finds both studies that associate EU
integration with centralisation in national ministerial administrations in
the form of privileged ‘EU core executives’ and arguments that stress the
progressive diffusion of EU-related decision-making throughout the
ministerial and non-ministerial administration, not least as new policy
instruments, such as the Open Method of Coordination, encourage
horizontal rather than vertical cooperation.
Europeanisation is certainly associated with major shifts in inter-
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institutional relations at the level of the member states; but there is no

clear evidence to indicate that, at the level of the member states, European
integration promotes governance at the expense of government.

EU Governance
Turning, finally, from national contexts to policy-making beyond state
borders, it is in the context of European integration that the concept of
governance has taken on special prominence. The online database on EU
governance literature, GOVLIT, in mid-August 2007, contained some 3,345
entries and the search term ‘governance’ produced 1,006 entries (by
contrast, ‘government’, ‘governing’ and ‘govern’ generated 266, 70 and 8
entries, respectively). Indeed, for many, it seems governing and public
policy-making at the EU level and EU governance have become largely
synonymous. A recent review article by Kohler-Koch and Rittberger (2006)
on the ‘governance turn in EU studies’ underlines this fact. Although, as ‘a
concept, EU governance requires some considerable ‘‘stretching’’ to include
all areas of EU policy-making activity’ (ibid.: 33), central tenets of the EU
policy process highlighted by Kohler-Koch and Rittberger – notably the
importance of the ‘Community method’, the multi-level character of the
decision-making system (‘multi-level governance’), the inclusion of private
actors (‘network governance’), and ‘under-politicisation’ – are all taken as
evidence of EU governance. EU enlargement has already been identified as a
further spur towards ‘more flexible, decentralized and soft modes of
governance’ (Zielonka 2007).
Again, as in the national context, my purpose is not to question the utility
of the concept of governance for the study of the EU or, perhaps more
quixotically, to deny the existence of central tenets of EU governance. It is,
however, important to stress that a great – and arguably increasing – share
of EU policy-making is resolutely centred on public institutions – EU-level
and national. In many instances, EU policy-making processes show few
 Governance as a Path to Government 271

signs of the pluralisation of decision centres and, in particular, the opening

to collective private actors, which the notion of governance suggests. This
point has been made with some force by Börzel (2005)

Although it could be expected that the EU governs increasingly

through non-hierarchical networks, one finds – compared to the
national and international levels – surprisingly few structures in which
public and private actors cooperate on equal terms in mixed public–
private networks in decision-making and implementation. Tripartite
negotiation systems and other forms of public–private partnerships, as
they have existed for a long time in the member states and which
increasingly also emerge in international politics, can only be found to
a limited extent at the European level (. . .) Until now, there are no
forms of public–private co-regulation at the European level compar-
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able to those in the member states. Nor does one find multi-level
cooperation between supranational decision-makers and private
actors in the various member states and regions, which would involve
the latter on equal terms in the determination and implementation of
European policy programmes. (ibid.: 73–4; my translation, KHG)

Multi-level interactions are, then, often monopolised by governments –

multi-level government. This is, of course, particularly the case in the second
and third pillars of the EU – i.e. foreign and security policy and police and
judicial cooperation in criminal matters – where the Council decides alone
and member state governments traditionally enjoy considerable autonomy
from domestic interest groups. The more second and, in particular, third
pillar policies move centre-stage, the less EU policy-making and governance
can be equated.

From Governance to Government: The Sharp Edges of the State

The argument advanced so far has been that governance constitutes part of
the reality of how modern states are run, but that the traditional
institutions, processes and means of governing associated with the concept
of ‘government’ still prevail at national and probably also at EU levels. If
parts of the governance literature make claims about a more general shift
away from government to governance this is not just because they read
empirical developments differently from what is suggested here. Rather, it is
the result of two closely related shortcomings of the governance literature:
first, the ‘selectivity of the governance perspective’, which, as Renate
Mayntz has repeatedly highlighted (2002, 2004, 2005), lies in the ‘problem-
solving bias’ of governance theories; and, second, the ahistorical nature of
much governance research. These two shortcomings combined mean that
the governance literature neglects how states progressively accrue the
capacity for hierarchical intervention. Thus, what to many governance
 272 K. H. Goetz

analysts appears as a shift away from government may turn out to be a path
towards government.
Mayntz’s critique focuses on the common understanding of governance as
‘an action or process oriented towards the solution of collective problems’
(Mayntz 2005: 17; my translation, KHG). This focus on ‘successful or
unsuccessful regulation’, she argues, neglects the ‘eminently political motive
of gaining and maintaining political power for its own sake’ (Mayntz 2004:
74; emphasis original; my translation, KHG). In reality, she adds, ‘politics is
not always and primarily about fulfilling tasks, producing benefits and
problem-solving, but often primarily about gaining and maintaining
political power’. But governance tends to reduce conflicts amongst political
institutions and actors to disputes over policy priorities and preferences; it is
largely oblivious to struggles for power that pervade the core state
institutions and the business of government. For example, when Kohler-
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Koch and Rittberger (2006) identify ‘under-politicisation’ as one of the

defining characteristics of EU governance, this characterisation tells us
perhaps more about the governance perspective than about the EU policy
process.
It is consistent with this perspective that questions of democratic
legitimacy are also primarily viewed from the perspective of performance.
As Peters and Pierre (2006: 39) have pointed out in the context of their
analysis of ‘governance, accountability and democratic legitimacy’, from the
governance perspective (. . .) legitimacy emerges as a problem because the
state is underperforming. The raison d’être and legitimacy of the state in the
governance debate is derived primarily from its performance in terms of
outputs – services, decisions, and actions’. Even where it is explicitly
acknowledged that ‘governance is not only about participation, consensus
or functional reorganization, but involves power’ (Benz and Papadopoulos
2006b: 274), what is described as ‘input-legitimacy’ is understood as ‘how
the interests of citizens are transferred into policy-making, which procedures
are applied, which interests are included and excluded and how this selection
is justified’ (ibid.: 275).
This narrow understanding of what motivates and drives political actors
and institutions at the heart of the state, what shapes institutional settings
and public policy profiles leaves out much of what students of comparative
European government study routinely. Perhaps the most conspicuous
weakness is the neglect of political parties in much of the governance
literature, even though political parties are omnipresent in the central
institutions of the state (Mair 2008). It is because of this neglect of politics
and power struggles that analysts of governance are much better placed at
studying how policy-making challenges are processed than at understanding
the dynamics of how political problems emerge (or do not).
Yet how problems and state capacity materialise is critical to under-
standing the relationship between governance and government. Two very
well-known points are worth remembering here. First, state capacity takes
 Governance as a Path to Government 273

time to evolve, so that in response to qualitatively or quantitatively new

problems we would, at first, expect greater reliance on private and social
actors as the capacity for hierarchical state intervention and/or state
provision is build up over decades, if not centuries. Second, even under
liberal-democratic conditions, state tasks and state capacity are often
accrued in the face of strong societal opposition. Both points require brief
elaboration.
When discussing governance it is worth remembering that the sharp edges
of the state have taken time to emerge. In many parts of Europe, for
example, private tax farming remained common Europe throughout the
eighteenth century, as the state lacked the capacity to effectively monitor tax
collection by state officials (Bonney 1999); this ‘governance’ arrangement
was only discontinued when modern European states acquired a permanent
career bureaucracy. Similarly, the collection of information on citizens
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moved from governance to government arrangements. Summarising the

trajectory of information collection in England from 1500 to the present
day, Higgs (2004: 196) writes that

The (. . .) history of the English State can be seen not in terms of the
expansion of power and authority from a central point outwards but
as a contraction inwards. The state ceased to be a set of processes
involving elites across the whole society undertaking tasks on an
unpaid, amateur basis. Instead, it became the preserve of a centralised,
salaried core of civil servants and party politicians.

Many other examples could be mentioned: the move from private,

mercenary to state armies; the progressive introduction and nationalisation
of education; or the nationalisation of welfare and the establishment of vast
welfare bureaucracies. The point is that in each of those cases one can
observe a progressive etatisation of tasks and the accumulation of the legal,
financial, organisational and informational prerequisites for hierarchical
state action, so that the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ progressively lengthened.
The governability literature understood this lengthening of the shadow of
the state – in particular the massive expansion of the post-war welfare state –
as a consequence of ever-increasing demands placed by citizens on the state.
The same perspective dominates in the governance literature. Where
governance is, furthermore, linked to the provision of ‘common goods’
(Héritier 2002), the assumption that governance is at heart about meeting
voters’ expectations and functional imperatives becomes even stronger,
whether it concerns environmental protection, health care or education.
How is it such an apparently responsive state compatible with evidence of
the continued erosion of political support and scepticism, if not cynicism,
towards government in much of Europe (Dalton 2004; Dalton and Weldon
2005)? The gloomy scenarios of ungovernability reviewed at the start of the
paper have not materialised. Public policy-makers have not run short of
 274 K. H. Goetz

weighty problems to address, but the view that there is a systemic problem
overload, the unresolvability of which progressively delegitimises the state in
the eyes of the citizens, is not now widely held. Public deficits – perhaps the
most tangible indication of a gap between expectations and capacity to
deliver – have been brought firmly under control in much of Europe; there
are no signs of major tax revolts; and on many indicators – e.g., public
health, education, per capita GDP – at least Western European govern-
ments seem to perform much better than 30 years ago. Yet, and this does, at
first sight, appear as a paradox, whilst the crisis of governability as
understood then appears to have been countered effectively, the crisis of
legitimacy appears to have persisted.
For the non-specialist what seems especially puzzling about this
development, which is associated with phenomena such as increasing voter
apathy and the rise of populist parties of the left and the right, is that it is
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also taking place in countries such as Austria, Denmark or Norway, which

do very well on most public policy indicators. This raises the possibility –
and nothing more is suggested here – that the crisis of governability may
have partly mutated into a crisis of being governed. What does this mean?
The responsive state is also one that places ever-increasing demands and
expectations on its citizens; moreover, in seeking to realise these demands
and expectations, Europe’s democratic states rely, as ever, if not more so, on
(legitimate) coercion. In fact, the citizens in Europe are as tightly, if not
more tightly, governed than ever before under conditions of democratic
government; and the coercive powers of the state continue to be extended.
This becomes clear if we remind ourselves of the state’s demands on its
citizens’ income and wealth; their cultural tolerance; their sense of political
identity and self-determination; or their civil liberties.
Thus, for the most Europeans, taxes and mandatory social contributions
are on the increase, whilst relative entitlement levels tend to decline. Perhaps
more importantly, in pursing their claims public agencies have progressively
extended their rights to monitor, access and store private information, often
without the knowledge, let alone consent, of those whose information is
being used. Many European states pursue policies that test the cultural
tolerance of at least parts of their citizenry. Such policies are often
concerned with equality and minority rights and government does not shy
away from creating new criminal offences so as to make sure that these new
rights are vigorously enforced. But we also find instances of governments
that appear to reject ‘minority politics’, yet, in doing so, rely on the
same coercive methods, as when the French government, in 2004, outlawed
the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols (such as kippot, headscarves
or turbans) in state schools. The European integration process, in
particular, places demands on citizens’ sense of political identity and self-
determination. To put it provocatively: it requires the citizens of Sweden to
accept that the Romanian government and Maltese MEPs have a legitimate
role in determining an ever-growing part of the laws to under which they
 Governance as a Path to Government 275

live. Internally, traditional cultural identities are called into question

through state-sanctioned mass immigration. Finally, under the banner of
fighting crime and terrorism and maintaining law and order, European
states have progressively extended their powers and, in particular, their
access to technological abilities to keep their citizens under surveillance in
their daily lives.
In short, the sharp edges of the state place growing demands on European
citizens. The hierarchical state, relying on further reinforced means of
coercion, seems alive and well. The extent to which this coercion is also
recognised as legitimate by the people is at least open to debate. Certainly,
previous historical experience would lead us to expect that that path from
governance to government will not be a smooth one.
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Notes
1. See also, e.g., the two influential volumes on Regierbarkeit (governability) edited by Hennis
et al. (1977; 1979), which highlighted fundamental changes in the basic conditions of
governing and noted that ‘the colossus of modern statehood’ stood ‘on feet of clay’ (Hennis
1977: 17; my translation, KHG).
2. This section draws on Goetz 2006.

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