Images of Statehood: Subnational Administrative Elites in Times of Crisis

Top officials play a crucial role in policy-making. Their political views constitute their compass for doing their day-to-day business – and are therefore of great concern to social scientists. In this paper we analyze the images of statehood of subnational administrative elites in the European Union. In particular we tap into whether top “regio-crats” prefer the state to strongly intervene into the economy (economic governance dimension) and whether they prefer a supranational or intergovernmental European Union (European governance dimension). We contend that these are two crucial dimension of changing statehood. We will trace the images of regio-crats on data taken from two (related) attitudinal surveys (2007, 2012) in five and eleven European countries respectively. With the help of this data we will be able to describe patterns of images on statehood of subnational administrative elites and to find out whether the financial crisis had any traceable impact. In addition, we develop a model in order to test whether factors like the national advancement in introducing New Public Management reforms, classical differences in administrative culture, differential austerity pressures or generational effects determine regio-crats images of statehood.