Implications of Agencifi cation

Sonia M. Ospina and Rogan Kersh, Editors
Jarle Trondal
University of Agder, Norway
University of Oslo, Norway

Agencification

Koen Verhoest, Sandra Van Thiel, Geert Bouckaert, and
Per Lægreid, eds., Government Agencies: Practices
and Lessons from 30 Countries (Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 496 pp. $170.00 (cloth),
ISBN: 9780230354357; $54.00 (paper), ISBN:
9780230354364.

O

ne persistent theme in public administration
is whether a government portfolio should
be organized as an integrated ministry or
as a dual organization composed of a ministerial
department and one or several semidetached agencies (Verhoest et al. 2012). “Agencification” has been

high on the agenda of administrative policy makers
for two decades, partly because of the New Public
Management (NPM) wave. Two decades of NPM
reforms have made the agencification phenomenon
highly topical and attracted considerable scholarly
attention. After at least two decades of agencification
research, it is time to take stock. Our starting point
for doing so is Government Agencies: Practices and
Lessons from 30 Countries, edited by Koen Verhoest,
Sandra Van Thiel, Geert Bouckaert, and Per Lægreid.
Essentially, this book offers a state-of-the-art account
of agencification. One ambition of this book review is
to bring two literatures together that are often mutually ignorant: public administration and European
studies. Whereas most studies on agencification
have ignored this, the book under review represents
an attempt to advance research along this line. Still,
the European dimension receives scant attention in
this study. This book review highlights a broader set
of implications of agencification, particularly with
respect to (1) political steering and autonomy and (2)

the rise of multilevel administration.
Students of agencification have focused on the causes
of agencification as well as its consequences (e.g.,
Christensen and Lægreid 2006; Lægreid and Verhoest
2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004; Pollitt et al. 2004).
One noticeable bias in this literature is that the vast
majority of the “agencification” scholarship is geared
toward administrative history, reform, and change and

less toward the effects of agencification (e.g., Pollitt et
al. 2004). Moreover, to the extent that this literature
has explored the effects of agencification, organization structures, procedures, and legal capacities have
served as key independent variables. A comprehensive
understanding of agencification needs to bring several
literatures together. Government Agencies contributes
to rebalancing an overly legal bias in much of the
agency literature.

Jarle Trondal is professor in the
Department of Political Science and

Management at the University of Agder,
Norway, and the ARENA Centre for
European Studies, University of Oslo,
Norway.
E-mail: jarle.trondal@uia.no

This book review asks three sets of questions:
1. What is agencification?
2. What explains agencification?
3. What implications does agencification yield?
What Is Agencification?
Historically, ministerial portfolios have been arranged
either as “integrated ministries,” meaning that a
ministerial portfolio constitutes a unitary organization, or as vertically specialized structures, meaning
that a portfolio is split into a ministerial, or cabinetlevel, department, on the one hand, and one or more
separate agencies, on the other (Verhoest et al. 2012,
3). Over time, agencies seem to have been moved
out of and into ministerial departments, often in a
cyclical manner (Aucoin 1990; Hood and Jackson
1991; Pollitt 2008; Verhoest, Bouckaert, and Peters

2007). By an “agency,” we mean an administrative
body that is formally separated from a ministerial,
or cabinet-level, department and that carries out
public tasks at a national level on a permanent basis,
is staffed by public servants, is financed mainly by the
state budget, and is subject to public legal procedures.
Agencies are supposed to enjoy some autonomy from
their respective ministerial departments in regard to
decision making (Verhoest et al. 2012). However,
the respective ministers normally keep the political
responsibility for agencies’ activities (cf. Pollitt and
Talbot 2004). “Agencification” thus signifies a transfer
of government activities to bodies vertically specialized outside ministerial departments. Related to the
NPM movement, governments across continents have

Public Administration Review,
Vol. 74, Iss. 4, pp. 545–549. © 2014 by
The American Society for Public Administration.
DOI: 10.1111/puar.12252.

Book Reviews 545

established agencies at arm’s length from ministerial
departments in order to take care of certain regulatory
and administrative tasks (Pollitt et al. 2004; Verhoest
et al. 2004).
Agencification seems fairly often accompanied by
geographic relocation away from the national capital.
This spatial dimension has largely been neglected
in studies of agencification. Although an old topic
of administrative science (e.g., Gulick 1937), in the
study of state building, party formation, and voting
behavior (Rokkan and Urwin 1982), as well as the
symbolic meaning of architecture (Goodsell 1977),
the significance of place has been largely neglected in
scholarship on agencification (see, however, Egeberg
and Trondal 2011a).
During the last couple of decades, agencification
has also been observed in the European Union (EU)
(Ongaro et al. 2012). Currently, more than 30 EU

agencies have been established (and new agencies are
pending). Apart from being geographically spread
throughout the Union, EU agencies cover multiple
policy areas; have various legal standings and formal
powers, staffing, and funding provisions; and engage
in a web of relations with external institutions. EU
agencies have been considered weak in most terms.
However, the quantitative leap of EU agencification is
increasingly causing a qualitative shift in terms of the
establishment of EU agencies with ever-more regulatory power and within policy domains of core state
powers (e.g., economic affairs, foreign and security
affairs). Studies show that agencification at the EU
level in many cases is basically about transferring
action capacity from the constituent states to the EU
level. For example, EU agencies seem to establish
relatively stronger relationships with the European
Commission than with members’ state governments.
This seems to particularly be the case in relationship
to the implementation of EU legislation and also in
areas where the Commission has established administrative capacities that partly overlap or duplicate

the capacities of EU agencies (Egeberg and Trondal
2011b). Agencification at the EU level thus seems to
contribute to a consolidation of executive power of
the Commission, although at arm’s length from political oversight by commissioners.
What Explains Agencification?
The book under review suggests several mechanisms
of agencification. Agencification may be accounted for
by (1) organizational, (2) functional, (3) contingency,
and (4) institutional (myth) approaches. According to
an organizational or institutional approach, agencies
come about through power struggles and compromises
conditioned by preexisting organizational structures.
Organizational change is framed by the heritage of
structures, and new agencies are thus likely to be
embedded within existing organizational architectures
546

Public Administration Review • July | August 2014

(see Radin 2012, 17). According to a functionalist

account, agencification is a response to collective action
problems. The principal–agent model is often the
analytical expression of this functional logic, together
with the notion of transaction costs (see Tallberg 2003,
25). The benefits of agencies “lie in the reduction
of political transaction costs, by providing solutions
to collective-action problems that prevent efficient
political exchange” (Tallberg 2003, 26). Contingent
events may help explain institutional change and the
timing of organizational birth (see March and Olsen
1989; Pierson 2004). Decisions to create agencies have
been motivated by the need to respond to particular
circumstances of the moment and, in some cases,
to crises. Finally, the creation of agencies can also be
seen as a trend in public policy and as a fashionable
idea within the realms of public management (see
Christensen and Lægreid 2006). Meyer and Rowan
(1977, 343) emphasize the importance of cultural rules
within wider institutional environments that take the
form of “rationalized myths.” They are myths because

they are widely held beliefs whose effects “inhere, not
in the fact that individuals believe them, but in the
fact that they ‘know’ everyone else does, and thus that
‘for all practical purposes’ the myths are true” (Meyer
1975, 75). Delegating tasks to “independent” agencies
was increasingly popular in domestic politics across
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development area in the late 1980s and therefore was
likely to appeal to many national governments.
Implications of Agencification
Implications of agencification are noticeable with
respect to (1) political steering and autonomy and
(2) the rise of multilevel administration. Government
Agencies is particularly interested the first type of
effects and largely ignores the latter. This bias in the
study of implications of agencification, however, is
prevalent in agencification studies. Before proceeding,
we should emphasize that the sheer number of agencies across countries should not, in itself, matter with
regard to the effects of agencification. These effects
are arguably conditioned by particular organizational

forms, not by the statistical distribution of these
forms.
A recent study (Egeberg and Trondal 2009) shows
that agency officials pay significantly less attention to
signals from executive politicians than their counterparts in ministerial departments. The relationship is a
robust one: it holds when controlling for the type of
tasks, the amount of public debate, and contestation
and officials’ rank. Last, but not least, the findings are
highly consistent across time. At the agency level, the
more modest attention to political signals from above
seems partly “compensated for” by more emphasis
on user and client interests. Thus, the autonomous
institution is seldom found; more autonomy gained in
one relationship may be followed by more dependence

in another relationship (Olsen 2009; Thatcher 2002).
Officials routinely have to cope with what might
become competing expectations. However, because it
is often assumed that the relationship between formal
structure and actual behavior is relatively weak in this

respect (e.g., Christensen and Lægreid 2006), it might
be expected that changing administrative doctrines
(e.g., NPM, “whole of government”) made a difference in regard to agency decision making. This is not
the case, however: the proportion of agency personnel
emphasizing political signals was not smaller in 1996
(the NPM era) than it was in 1986 (the pre-NPM
period) (Egeberg and Trondal 2009). However,
the more organizational capacity is available in the
respective ministerial departments, the more agency
personnel tend to assign weight to signals from their
respective ministers (see also Verhoest et al. 2010).
Government Agencies focuses primarily on organizational structure and procedures as independent
variables. One neglected variable is agency location.
Even though geographic relocation fairly often (but
far from always) seems to have accompanied agencification (e.g., in the EU), the potential effect of agency
location has thus far escaped scholarly attention. A
recent large-scale survey (Egeberg and Trondal 2011a)
documents that agency site does not make a significant difference for agency autonomy, agency influence, and interinstitutional coordination. This study
focused on already semidetached, often highly specialized agencies whose “need” for being steered, influenced, or coordinated with others is relatively modest.
It may thus still be possible that organizational location makes a difference if the research focus is directed
toward bodies that are relatively more involved in the
policy-making process.
Given that many decision processes are often hectic
and intertwined, to be on the spot means that many
actors and arenas can be reached in a relatively short
time. Thus, under such circumstances, geographic
proximity might be convenient. Hence, the impact of
site might be conditioned by policy stage and the temporal dimensions of decision making (Goetz 2012).
Notwithstanding missing effects of agency location on
administrative behavior, agency locus might indeed
have symbolic effects of importance (Goodsell 1977).
An often neglected question in the agency literature—
and also seen in the Verhoest et al. volume—is how
agencification affect the rise of European multilevel
administration. National agencies organized at arm’s
length from their parent ministerial departments and
which also in practice are partly decoupled from direct
steering from these departments constitute an administrative infrastructure for agency capture. Essentially,
national agencies may become building blocks of a
multilevel EU administration. The main EU executive body, the European Commission, lacks its own

agencies at the national level for the implementation
of EU policies. In order to generate uniform implementation across the EU, the commission in cooperation with EU agencies seems to establish partnerships
with national agencies, partly circumventing ministerial departments. National agencies are thus becoming
“double-hatted,” serving both national ministries and
EU-level bodies (Egeberg 2006). Agency decoupling
(from ministerial departments) at the national level
makes agency recoupling across levels of governance
possible. Integrated ministries would not have been
conducive to such a development. Thus, recoupling
(“de-agencification”) at the national level would seriously challenge administrative integration across levels
of governance (Egeberg and Trondal 2011b).
Conclusion
Few literatures have addressed the agency phenomenon in a comprehensive fashion (Busuioc, Groenleer,
and Trondal 2012; Christensen and Lægreid 2006;
Pollitt et al. 2004; Verhoest et al. 2010). Government
Agencies is one striking exception. One characteristic
of the agencification literature is the study of formal
goals, resources, and structures of agencies. It stresses
the constitutive rules on which agencies are based and
the legal framework in which they are operating. The
role of agencies and their potential impact has thus
often been derived from their legal competences and
their formal design features (e.g., Chiti 2000, 2009;
Szapiro 2005; Vos 2000, 2005).
While this constitutes a necessary starting point, such
approaches need to be supplemented by the study
of actual practices to verify that extent to which the
expected cues and patterns manifest themselves in
practice. Other students of agencies look into the
perceived functional necessity of agency creation or
the political dominance of its principals on the agency
through design. They emphasize that their creation
logically follows from the need for executive capacity or that agencies operate under a set of political constraints. Agencies are considered functional
solutions addressing a perceived need by these actors
or political instruments through which governments act (Dehousse 1997; Kelemen 2002; Kreher
1997; Majone 1997; Yataganas 2001). Yet others see
the agencification process taking place as the emergence of a multilevel administration—primarily in a
European context—but pay limited attention to the
role of (individual) agencies in the increasingly complex European executive order (Curtin and Egeberg
2008; Egeberg 2006; Trondal 2010).
The underlying assumption in the existing literature on agencies is often that agencies do what their
creators want them to do; agencies are expected
to develop in ways intended by their creators. The
foregoing observation is also largely applicable to
studies of the effects of agency creation and design.
Book Reviews 547

As delegation of tasks to independent agencies started
gaining momentum with an ever-growing number
of agencies being delegated far-reaching tasks (i.e.,
decision making and quasi-regulatory tasks), anxiety
arose at the possibility of them escaping accountability
and control. Scholars have pointed to the possible
consequences of placing too much power in the hands
of such agencies operating at an arm’s length from traditional control and appointed agency heads who cannot easily be held accountable for their actions (e.g.,
Curtin 2005; Dehousse 2008; Everson 1995; Flinders
2004; Shapiro 1997; Vos 2000, 2005; Williams
2005). However, most studies of agency accountability and control to date have largely focused on de jure
arrangements, as provided for in the agencies’ basic
acts, without delving into the de facto operation of
such arrangements (but see Busuioc 2010a, 2010b).
The volume by Verhoest et al. contributes to rebalancing this overly legal bias in much of the agency
literature. In that same spirit, this book review aims
to bring scholarship of public administration and
European studies together by highlighting a broader
set of implications of agencification, particularly with
respect to (1) political steering and autonomy and (2)
the rise of multilevel administration. The process of
agencification inside sovereign states and within the
EU system accompanies profound implications for the
politico-administrative order in Europe and for how
we should understand it.
Acknowledgments
This book review was supported financially by the
Norwegian Research Council, the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation, and a
Basic Research Grant from the University of Agder,
Norway.
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