Two decades of New Public Management have placed agencifiction high on the agenda of administrative policy-makers. However, agencification (and de-agencification) has been one of the enduring themes of public administration. Agencies organized at arm’s length from ministerial departments have...

The EU is gradually expanding its executive capacity through agencies, and some of the newcomers in the agency family have a larger regulatory potential than the previous ones. This paper analyses the genesis of the European Chemical Agency (ECHA), a newly born European regulatory agency....

Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to undermine political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards the robustness of these findings. In this paper we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from...

Civil servants in international secretariats are exposed to numerous, crosscutting and, at times, conflicting pressures and expectations. The OECD secretariat is no different. This study reveals a fundamental ‘misfit’ between external demands and internal dynamics in the OECD secretariat. On...

Civil servants in international secretariats are exposed to numerous, crosscutting and, at times, conflicting pressures and expectations. The OECD secretariat is no different. This study reveals a fundamental ‘misfit’ between external demands and internal dynamics in the OECD secretariat. On...

Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years and is possibly experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and...

While role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have been fairly well documented, studies on the internal functioning of the College of the European Commission have been almost lacking. Thus, highly inconsistent images exist; ranging...

The unequal access of interest organizations to the EU institutions is often associated with biased European politics. Nonetheless, systematic accounts of interest group access are rare. Rooted in the organizational theory of resource dependencies and drawing on a survey of 800 EU and national...

How can students of the European Union get from describing recent advances, to speculating about what are possible new directions and research agendas? How promising are terms such as “governance” and “the new governance” for improving the understanding how the Union is overned and...