Gary Marks

Gary Marks (born 1952 in London) is an American-based academic and an expert on multilevel governance and the European Union.

He is a Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He is also a recurring Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence.

Marks developed the concept of "multilevel governance.”

Gary Marks was born in 1952 in London, UK.

He completed a B.Soc.Sc.

at Birmingham University in England and received his M.A. in political science from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1974.

In 1982 he received his PhD in political science from Stanford University.

He was a student of Seymour Martin Lipset and Gabriel Almond.

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.

Marks developed this concept to characterize the European Union decision-making dynamics in a 1993 publication.

Since then, the concept has been featured in the titles of many articles and several dozen books.

Marks’ research over the past decade has sought to theorize the causes and consequences 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.

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.

Multilevel governance (MLG) can be described as the dispersion of authority away from central states to subnational and supranational levels.

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.”

From 1997 to 1999, Marks was the Chair of the European Union Studies Association.

In their 2003 American Political Science Review article Marks and Hooghe conceptualize two ideal-types of MLG, general purpose (or Type I) and task-specific (or Type II) governance, with the goal of theorizing the "unraveling of the state" in Europe and beyond.

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—specialised jurisdictions.

Each makes a delimited set of authoritative decisions on a particular problem, task, or issue.

Jurisdictions are problem-encompassing; each jurisdiction specialises 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 co-ordinate.

Marks is married to fellow political scientist Liesbet Hooghe.

From 2004 to 2016 Marks was also chair in Multilevel Governance at the VU University Amsterdam.

Gary Marks has been a visiting fellow/professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona; the University of Twente, Enschede; Sciences Po, Paris; the Higher Institute of Sciences in Vienna; the WZB in Berlin; the Hanse wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst; the Free University of Berlin; and the EUI, Florence.

He was recipient of an Advanced European Research Council Grant (2010–2015) for a research program titled "Causes and Consequences of Multilevel Governance".

In 2011, he was awarded the Humboldt Research Prize for his contributions to political science.

In 2017, he was awarded the Daniel J. Elazar Distinguished Federalism Award from the American Political Science Association.

Marks has published multiple books, several special issues and he has authored or co-authored many articles.