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AbstractAgencies operate in highly volatile and uncertain environments. Changing political coalitions and sudden crises may result in the reorganization of agencies. Under these circumstances, agencies may experience a variety of structural transitions. The uncertainties and the inevitability of compromises, however, deem it difficult to predict which of all possible forms of structural change agencies will experience. In this article, we develop and test competing risks models that aim to capture situations in which administrative agencies may experience one out of range of possible transitions. The models are tested on dataset of 483 agencies established between 1945 and 2012 in the Netherlands. Our main finding is that the different transitions that agencies can experience have different underlying causal processes. Herewith the study empirically demonstrates that agency reorganization is not a binary choice between life and death and shows the value of competing risks approaches to the agency termination literature.

What really does change when a bureaucratic agency is created? What will the nature of a new agency's interactions be with political and administrative actors in its environment? Despite the large interest in administrative reform during the past few decades, there has been only little attention given to institutionalization processes that follow the creation of independent public agencies. This article formulates a model of political-bureaucratic adaptation between politicians and newly established agencies. It is built on the concepts of bureaucratic autonomy, administrative culture, and habituation. The model is illustrated with the case of Independent Administrative Bodies in the Netherlands.

AbstractThis article focuses on problems of institutional design from a political perspective. It examines the problems of agentification using a principal–agent framework, and attempts to explain the choices made between problems of commitment and problems of agency. The fundamental problem addressed is the degree of autonomy possible within a broader framework of political control of policy. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.