Gary Marks

Gary Marks (born 7 June 1952 in London)^[1] is best known for developing the concept of “multilevel governance.” Marks is married to fellow political scientist Liesbet Hooghe.^[2] He is a research professor in Multilevel Governance at the VU University Amsterdam and Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He completed a B.Soc.Sc. at Birmingham University in England and received his M.A. in political science from UC Santa Barbara in 1974. In 1982 he received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. He was a student of Seymour Martin Lipset and Gabriel Almond.

Academic appointments and honors

Marks took up a tenure-track position at the University of Virginia in 1982. In 1986 Marks moved to UNC-Chapel Hill where he became Associate Professor in 1989, Full Professor in 1994 and Burton Craige Distinguished Professor in 2004.^[3] In 2004 Marks was appointed Chair in Multilevel Governance at the VU University Amsterdam.^[4]

Since 2000, Marks has accepted visiting professorships and fellowships in Spain, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. He is recipient of an Advanced European Research Council Grant (2010–2015) for a research program titled “Causes and Consequences of Multilevel Governance”.^[5] In 2011, he was awarded the Humboldt Research Prize for his contributions to political science.^[6]

Publications and leadership

Gary Marks has published nine books, several special issues and he has authored or co-authored many articles. From 1997 to 1999, Marks was the Chair of the European Union Studies Association. At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill he was the founding Director of the Center for European Studies and the European Union Center for Excellence at UNC-CH, which he led from 1994 to 2006.^[7]

Multilevel governance

Multilevel governance (MLG) can be described as the dispersion of authority away from central states to subnational and supranational levels. Marks developed this concept to describe the European Union decision-making dynamics in a 1993 publication.^[8] Since then, the concept has been featured in the titles of more than 100 articles and several dozen books.^[9][10] Marks’ research over the past decade has sought to theorize the conditions of MLG and systematize information about governance at the subnational and international levels; to analyze preferences and conflicts over multilevel governance, especially in Europe; to understand the causality of multilevel governance in a broad comparative frame, drawing on literature in political science, history, economics, and sociology; and to generate data that is suitable for testing expectations in these fields.

In a 1996 Journal of Common Market Studies article, Marks and co-authors develop the concept of multilevel governance and contrast it with intergovernmentalism.

“Instead of the two-level game assumptions adopted by state centrists, MLG theorists posit a set of overarching, multi-level policy networks… The presumption of multi-level governance is that these actors participate in diverse policy networks, and this may involve sub-national actors — interest groups and subnational governments — dealing directly with supranational actors.”^[11]

In their 2003 American Political Science Review article Marks and Hooghe conceptualize two ideal-types of MLG, Type I and Type II, with the goal of theorizing the “unraveling of the state” in Europe and beyond.^[12]

Type I governance, predominant within states, roots jurisdictions around human communities at differing scales. These jurisdictions—international, national, regional, meso, local—are general-purpose. They bundle multiple functions, including a range of policy responsibilities, and in many instances, a court system and representative institutions. The boundaries of such jurisdictions do not intersect. The result is an elegant system of jurisdictions nested across levels and non-overlapping at any particular level.

Type II governance, predominant above states, conceives of jurisdictions built around policy problems. Governance is fragmented into functionally specific pieces—specialized jurisdictions. Each makes a delimited set of authoritative decisions on a particular problem, task, or issue. Jurisdictions are problem-encompassing; each jurisdiction specializes in one or a few governance functions; the number of such jurisdictions is potentially huge, and the scales at which they operate vary finely. The jurisdictions overlap, intersect, and rarely coordinate.

Books

2010. The Rise of Regional Authority: a comparative study of 42 democracies^[13]

2004. European Integration and Political Conflict: Citizens, Parties, Groups^[14]

2001. Multi-level Governance and European Integration^[15]

2000. It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States?^[16]

1999. Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism^[17]

1996. Governance in the European Union^[18]

1992. Reexamining Democracy: Essays in Honor of Seymour Martin Lipset^[19]

1992. The Crisis of Socialism in Europe^[20]

1989. Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries^[21]

Recent journal articles

2012. “Europe and its Empires: From Rome to the European Union” in Journal of Common Market Studies^[22]

2009. “A postfunctionalist theory of European integration” with Liesbet Hooghe in British Journal of Political Science^[23]

2003. “Unraveling the central state, but how? Types of multi-level governance” with Liesbet Hooghe in American Political Science Review.^[24]

2002. “Does left/right structure party positions on European integration?” with Liesbet Hooghe and Carole Wilson in Comparative Political Studies^[25]

2000. “The past in the present: A cleavage theory of party response to European integration” with Carole Wilson in British Journal of Political Science^[26]

Find further information on Marks' homepage.^[27]

References