The co-chairs of our research group, together with the loyal contributors to our long-standing research activities and successive edited volumes, share a common understanding: Public Administration is far from being a singular, specialized discipline. Rather, it constitutes an interdisciplinary field which brings together scholars from sister disciplines, who examine public bureaucracies in (inter-)action from their respective standpoints, in a European comparative perspective. We learned from Max Weber that “in everyday life, domination is primarily administration”. We also observe that the specific form of politico-administrative domination devised and refined by Western European civilization since the advent of Modernity – namely, the State – remains both the persona ficta and actual apparatus through which the depatrimonialized, legal-rational, representative-democratic political order of our European polities/societies/economies is institutionalized, produced, reproduced, and legitimized.

Though challenged as sovereign entities by neoliberal globalization, major geopolitical shifts, transnational turbulences, and permacrises; though transformed by Europeanization into “Member-States” and by regional devolutions into one “layer of government” among others within complexifying systems of “multi-level governance”; and though subject to waves of more-or-less NPM-inspired or technology-driven administrative reforms, our European States, with their different historic paths, unequal institutional capacities and diversified trajectories, have not been “hollowed out”. Within today’s European Union, States persist in their very being. They strive to uphold and reinvent their “nodality” amidst the three Ps of “the political”: polity, politics, policies.

In this ongoing project of domination, led by political masters, field research demonstrates the essential contribution of public bureaucracies and bureaucrats – from top civil servants who co-govern with the Prince and their entourages, through “middle managers” who navigate a maze of contradictory injunctions, to the modest “street- level” bureaucrats who implement on the ground, as best they can, the programmes of the “policy State” and deliver public services to more demanding and critical citizens.

These rich, complex, enduring yet evolving institutional arrangements, mobile configurations of actors, power relations and policy processes continue to merit our full scholarly attention and comparative exploration. They stand at the crossroads of Public Administration (stricto sensu), Public Policy, Political Science, Sociology, and other kindred disciplines of the social sciences – particularly History and Anthropology.

True to a proven method, our Research Group sets on its agenda – for several consecutive yearly conferences – a theme of interdisciplinary inquiry that aligns with this broader problematic. Thus, after having worked on and published a volume titled Prefects, Governors and Commissioners: Territorial Representatives of the State in Europe (2021), followed by exploring Core Executive Coordination in Europe (forthcoming 2026), we are currently engaged, with the team of the COST Action “Comparative Research on the Executive Triangle in Europe” (CoREx) project, in Questioning the Reign of the Entourages: Ministerial Cabinets, Policy Advisers, and Other Collaborators of the Executive within the European Union, our aim being to publish a collective opus under that title, covering all 27 EU Member States.