Unravelling multi-level governance systems
| Author | Michael Zürn |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120937449 |
| Subject Matter | Breakthrough Political Science Symposium on Multi-Level Governance |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120937449
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2020, Vol. 22(4) 784 –791
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1369148120937449
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
Unravelling multi-level
governance systems
Michael Zürn1,2
Abstract
One of the most important features of the multi-level governance research programme is the
parallel conceptualisation of the vertical and the horizontal relationships within multi-level
governance systems. Different systems of multi-level governance are characterised by the
relationships between political institutions on the same level (Are there many task-specific
organisations?) and by the relationship between different levels (On which level do we see political
communities?). By conceptualising scale and community in a substitutive way as Hooghe and Marks
in tendency do, some of the potentials are lost. I put forward the suggestion that treating the two
dimensions as independent would allow for an even fuller picture of the dynamics of politics in
multi-level governance systems.
Keywords
community, dynamics, multi-level governance, scale, types of MLG
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks’ (2003) ‘Unraveling the Central State, But how? – Types
of Multi-Level Governance’ was published in the American Political Science Review. It
generalised their earlier work Multi-Level Governance and European Integration (Hooghe
and Marks, 2001). Those two pieces together have more than 7800 Google citations (as of
28 January 2020) and they turned out to be the source of one of the most important political
science research programmes of the last decades. It comes very close to the notion of a
Lakatosian research programme consisting of a theoretical core and more specific theoreti-
cal statements that are formulated to explain the evidence as well as some auxiliary hypoth-
eses that may be amended against the background of deviating observations (Lakatos,
1970). ‘Unraveling the Central State’ laid the ground for such a programme: the multi-
level governance (MLG) research programme. The series of four volumes that Hooghe,
Marks, and colleagues have published over the last years with Oxford University Press
may turn out to be the pinnacle of this research programme (Hooghe et al., 2016, 2017,
2019a; Hooghe and Marks, 2016). However, it reaches far beyond Hooghe, Marks, and
their co-authors of these four volumes: MLG became a thriving theme and approach with
1WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany
2Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Corresponding author:
Michael Zürn, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Reichpietschufer 50, Berlin 10785, Germany.
Email: michael.zuern@wzb.eu
937449BPI0010.1177/1369148120937449The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsZürn
research-article2020
Breakthrough Article
To continue reading
Request your trial