ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how European integration affects a key characteristic of administrative practice in consensus democracies, namely national-level, external advice-seeking by civil servants. It discusses the characteristics of external advice-seeking in the consensus democracies of the Netherlands and Belgium up until roughly 1990. The administrative practice of advice-seeking relies on both civil society organizations and policy advisory bodies. The chapter derives several expectations from both the consensus democracy and the Europeanization literature on the possible effects of European integration on domestic external advice-seeking. It presents empirical synthesis of existing studies on external policy advice and combines this with a primary analysis of the effects of Europeanization on the practice of external advice-seeking. The chapter explains survey data of national senior civil servants in the Netherlands and conduct an analysis of secondary sources for both Belgium and the Netherlands. It focuses on the degree to which the expectations we formed are supported by the empirical evidence.
