The European Commission — Politics and Administration

Abstract

The concept of the European administrative space (see chapters 1 and 5 in this volume) provides a fertile testing ground for theories and empirical cases that probe the relationship between the administrative and the political in European public policy making. However, the pursuit of this agenda involves conjuring up not only an ‘administrative’ space, but also an equivalent political space (also referred to in much of the literature as a political ‘sphere’). If the European administrative space refers to the EU’s multilevel administrative system (Chapter 1), the European political space implies the existence of an equivalent multilevel political system. This chapter considers how these two ‘spaces’ — the European administrative space and the European political space — meet and interact/overlap to allow organizations sited at their confluence to draw on both administrative and political resources to influence policy making and ultimately policy outputs (Chapter 1).