On the cusp of the ceremony for receiving their honorary doctorate at Maastricht University, we speak with Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, professors in political science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at the European University Institute, and husband and wife. A story about an unusual and successful joint career that has brought rise to the political-scientific concept Multi-Level Governance. The concept is now broadly used to analyse global political developments and the political interventions needed to solve the big crises of this time, climate change and migration among them.
Love came first
Their love preceded their academic cooperation, although they both already had a strong academic interest. Hooghe and Marks met as Liesbet invited Gary to a conference at Oxford University. “You could argue that it was an intellectual connection that led us to meet each other”, Marks adds. “But we only started co-authoring when we were already a couple”. Now, Marks and Hooghe are the first couple to receive an honorary doctorate at Maastricht University. How do they feel about it? “It’s quite special to celebrate this together”, says Hooghe. “It has been an unusual career. Not for us personally, but unusual in a sense as a lot of our work has been joint work. Especially our theory on Multi-Level Governance developed from close collaboration”.
Development of a Multi-Level Governance Theory
Marks and Hooghe developed the concept of Multi-Level Governance in the 1990s and have been working on it ever since. Multi-level governance is the idea that large-scale political systems such as the European Union, are not simply a collection of nation states where, at most, states negotiate amongst each other. Rather, these unions are complex, interwoven networks of actors and institutions that operate on multiple levels. This is reflected in the ways that local, domestic (national) and supranational policies influence each other in various directions and break the ‘national mould’.
There were three main steps to developing the multilevel governance framework: coming up with the concept of multilevel governance in the 90s (1), distinguishing 2 types of multilevel governance – early 00s (2) and collecting data to build it empirically (3), the latter with the grant Marks and Hooghe received from the European Research Council. What started as a concept, describing “a reality that was already present in the European Union”, is now a theory that can be used and applied to other domains. “We are now sometimes in the position of giving a talk to people who know a lot more about multilevel governance in their particular domain than we do”, Hooghe and Marks explain. “It’s a little bit like someone has discovered something like penicillin, and other people figure out how to use it”.
“our theory met with a great deal of scepticism”
Challenges in academic acceptance
Nowadays, multi-level governance is an accepted concept for analysing political developments. It has been used to analyse dealing with the big crises of our time: climate change, migration and polarisation. How different this was in the earlier days! Liesbet: “I think in the early years, we were unusual. We were ‘the young couple working together’ and people found that interesting”.
Marks: “our theory met with a great deal of scepticism” as it complicated the traditional view of political science. Contrary to the then-prevailing belief of national states as independent, sovereign entities, Marks states, “we turned it around by saying: well these states are not independent, they’re all part of this overarching system of multi-level governance, where a national government may lose control over decisions impacting its citizens and can be outvoted on European matters”.
“The European system is a very strange kind of creature. It is the world’s most important political experiment”
Reflections on Democracy and Political Developments
The complexity of the European system and its multilevelness have become increasingly clear in recent years, with transnational crises such as migration, covid, armed conflict and climate change. These are issues that nations alone cannot solve. All of this pushes in the direction of a stronger European Union, Hooghe explains.
Hooghe: “But there are, at the same time, persistent pressures for the need for diversity within, so I think Europe is not on its way to become a very strong coherent federation”. One of these pressures is the rise of traditional authoritarian national parties (TAN) opposing European multilevel governance. Marks: “for the first time, you can see the possibility of these parties playing a major role in government”. In this way, the European Parliament and the upcoming European elections reflect the tendencies present within national states: fragmentation and the rise of TAN.
If European authority is to be strengthened, Marks expects that it will be in a more democratic fashion. He conceives a system not unlike the United States, with federal elections. Only it will be even more fragmented. But, he acknowledges that it is very hard to define what the future will bring. “The European system is a very strange kind of creature. It is the world’s most important political experiment”.
A suggestion for the upcoming elections
We end our interview on a hopeful note, asking what Hooghe and Marks would like our readers to take with them for the upcoming European elections in June.
“Cycle back to multilevel governance. Maybe you’re not happy with your national government? This year, you have another chance. The European level may just be a check to the national or the local level that you don’t like. Given that so many of the critical problems we face today are large-scale problems, they are not problems that local governments or small, even medium-sized governments, like the Dutch government, can deal with by themselves. So use the voice you have.”
Liesbet Hooghe studied Political Science at KU Leuven (Belgium), receiving her PhD in 1989. She is married to Gary Marks, who studied Economics and Political Science in Birmingham (UK) and obtained his PhD from Stanford University (USA) in 1982. Both work as professors of Political Science at the University of North Carolina and parttime also as Research Professors at the European University Institute in Florence.
