Tobias Bach

University of Oslo · Department of Political Science

Establishing and maintaining citizen trust is vital for the effectiveness and long-term viability of regulatory agencies. However, limited empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between regulatory action and citizen trust. This article addresses this gap by investigating the influence of various regulatory enforcement styles on c...

Trust between constituent actors within the European Union (EU)'s multilevel regulatory regimes is decisive for regulatory success. Trust drives information flows, increases compliance, and improves cooperation within these regimes. Despite its importance, systematic knowledge regarding the drivers of trust within regulatory regimes is limited. Thi...

A change of government or minister constitutes a stress test for the relationship between ministers and bureaucrats. The new political masters may question the loyalty of incumbent bureaucrats and seek to replace them. However, the relationship between political changes and administrative turnover is poorly understood in meritocratic systems. This...

Les spécialistes de la comparaison soulignent que l’administration publique doit être comprise en termes de modèles d’organisation et de prise de décision liés au contexte. Les agences situées dans un même contexte afficheront plus de points communs que celles situées dans un autre contexte. En parallèle, des données empiriques attestent de la vari...

This report outlines the steps taken to design and implement a stakeholder survey on trust and distrust in European regulatory governance and ultimately create a large, multi-actor, multi-level, multi-sector, and crosscountry dataset. Specifically, the report provides information about the mapping, ethical considerations, survey question and scale...

ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo promotes theoretically oriented, empirically informed studies analysing the dynamics of the evolving European political order. The research is multidisciplinary and organized along four key dimensions: A European democratic order; the EU's executive order; expertise and knowledge in the EU...

Organisational transitions in governments have long been discussed in the literature. While, more recently, organisational life cycle changes between birth and death have been the focus of research, a systematic comparison of organisational transitions across countries has barely been initiated. We aim to bridge this gap in the literature by provid...

Artikkelen studerer tilsetting av norske toppbyråkrater i et politiseringsperspektiv og ser på sammenhengen mellom politisk bakgrunn og kompetanse. Forskningsspørsmålene er (1) om toppbyråkrater med politisk bakgrunn er bedre eller dårligere kvalifisert enn andre toppbyråkrater når det gjelder fagkunnskap og ledererfaring og (2) om de som er tilkny...

A key claim in bureaucratic reputation literature is that reputation has several dimensions. This presents agencies with a difficult choice concerning which dimension(s) they should emphasize in the management of their reputation. This paper analyzes how regulatory agencies manage their reputation through communicative responses to public judgments...

The idea of a clear separation between policymaking and implementation is difficult to sustain for policy bureaucracies in which public officials have “policy work” as their main activity. A diverse body of scholarship indicates that bureaucrats may enjoy substantial levels of discretion in defining the nature of policy problems and elaborating on...

This essay elaborates how the analysis of administrative careers – both as dependent and independent variables – can be leveraged to gain a more systematic understanding of the relationship between politics and administration. It highlights how the analysis of administrative careers can provide answers to pertinent questions about the relationship...

Comparative scholars emphasise that public administration should be understood in terms of context-bound patterns of organising and decision-making. Agencies in the same context will display more commonalities than those in another. At the same time, there is good empirical evidence for organisational-level variation in decision-making. For instanc...

The article analyses the public attribution of blame and the use of presentational strategies of blame avoidance in complex delegation structures. We theorize and empirically demonstrate that complex delegation structures result in the diffusion of blame to multiple actors so that a clear allocation of responsibility becomes more difficult. The art...

Der Beitrag stellt unterschiedliche Definitionen von Agenturen vor und unterscheidet zwischen modernen Agenturen und unabhängigen Regulierungsbehörden als wichtigsten reformpolitischen Leitbildern. Anschließend stellt der Beitrag theoretische Erklärungen zur Agenturbildung vor, skizziert den Stand der Umsetzung in Deutschland und geht abschließend...

Der Beitrag setzt sich mit der politischen Dimension von Verwaltungsreformen auseinander. Es wird gezeigt, dass das rationale Problemlösungsmodell die Realität von Verwaltungsreformen nicht adäquat erfasst. Stattdessen spielen (mikro)politische Faktoren eine große Rolle für das Zustandekommen und die Umsetzung von Reformen. Dabei handelt es sich in...

This book addresses the practices of the German Bundestag in controlling the federal administration. Siefken elaborates on different notions of parliamentary control and provides a detailed mapping of the parliament’s use of formal control instruments from 1949 - 2017. Most interestingly for scholars of public administration, Siefken conducted eigh...

A key argument in recent theorizing on the drivers of bureaucratic behaviour is that agencies seek to establish and maintain a unique reputation. While recent years have witnessed substantial empirical support for this claim, the field lacks comparative examinations of the dynamics of reputation and its management throughout crisis periods. This ar...

This concluding chapter addresses two ‘so what?’ questions raised throughout the volume. First, if attention biases are a pertinent factor in organizational life in political contexts, what can be done about them? Bach and Wegrich discuss three public sector reform approaches (joined-up government, impact assessment, and behavioural insights) in te...

Bach and Wegrich introduce the key theme of the volume, which revolves around understanding how routine processes of decision-making in public sector organizations potentially lead to problematic outcomes in terms of coordination and problem solving. Instead of viewing those outcomes as the result of organizational or individual pathologies, the ch...

How to better coordinate policies and public services across public sector organizations has been a major topic of public administration research for decades. However, few attempts have been made to connect these concerns with the growing body of research on biases and blind spots in decision-making. This book makes that connection. It explores how...

Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives, edited by Rudy B. Andeweg, Robert Elgie, Ludger Helms, Juliet Kaarbo and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This article contributes to the literature on the politicization of appointments to increase political control over public bureaucracies with often substantial managerial and policy autonomy. Using data from a large-scale executive survey from central government ministries and agencies in 18 European countries, the article provides a comprehensive...

The politicization of bureaucracy is a widespread strategy to increase the political control of ministerial departments in parliamentary democracies. It is, however, largely unknown why executive politicians promote some officials rather than others to high public office. Based on a unique dataset of all senior officials in German federal ministrie...

The chapter starts by identifying the drivers of entanglement between European (supranational) and national administrations. A lack of administrative capacities and implementation competences on the Commission’s side, and member states’ interests in implementation as well as the disaggregation of the nation-state foster the development of tight adm...

Recent scholarship on advisory systems has focussed on the externalization of advisory capacities and sectoral dynamics of change, whereas changes of internal policy advisory systems have not yet been approached systematically. This article proposes an analytical concept for exploring change dynamics in internal policy advisory systems by means of...

This article investigates perceived accountability patterns of national agencies’ chief executives in four countries with a Rechtsstaat tradition and tests theoretical expectations about potential tensions between managerial reforms and administrative values using survey data (N = 453). All countries combine old and new forms of accountability requ...

This contribution introduces our symposium by highlighting four distinctive aspects of transnational governance from a bureaucratic politics perspective: the emergence of transnational institutions, their functioning, their impact on the domestic level, and the diffusion of regulatory standards. The general argument is that many accounts of transna...

This paper contributes to debates and research on politicization of appointments as a response to restore political control over bureaucracies with substantial managerial and policy discretion due to administrative reforms fostering decentralization, empowerment and managerial control. Using data from a large scale executive survey in central gover...

This article examines the influence of Europeanization on the relationship between ministries and agencies at the national level. The core argument is that the differentiated nature of the international environment (with policy development often transferred to the international level and policy implementation left at the national level) transforms...

In diesem Kapitel wird die Vorgehensweise bei der Erhebung und Analyse der empirischen Daten beschrieben, die in den folgenden Kapiteln analysiert werden. Die zentrale empirische Grundlage dieser Arbeit sind schriftliche bzw. online durchgeführte Befragungen verselbständigter Behörden, die im Kontext des COBRA-Netzwerks durchgeführt wurden. Das COB...

In diesem Kapitel stehen die abhängigen Variablen der vorliegenden Arbeit im Mittelpunkt, d. h. unterschiedliche Dimensionen behördlicher Autonomie und politischer Steuerung. Zunächst wird eine Begriffsbestimmung von behördlicher Autonomie und ministerieller Steuerung vorgenommen (Kapitel 2.1). Hierbei handelt es sich um die zentralen analytischen...

Im vorliegenden Kapitel, welches den empirischen Kern der Arbeit darstellt, stehen organisatorische Erklärungen für unterschiedliche Ausprägungen behördlicher Autonomie im Mittelpunkt (Organizational Patterns Approach). Zunächst werden – dem zweistufigen Forschungsdesign entsprechend – die in Kapitel 6 formulierten theoretischen Annahmen zum Zusamm...

Transnational networks of national agencies became almost ubiquitous in the European Union (EU) during the last two decades. However, the literature focuses almost exclusively on the functioning and impact of these networks on EU policy making. This article examines these networks from the hitherto neglected perspective of national agencies. Thereb...

The autonomy of government agencies in Germany and Norway: explaining variation in management autonomy across countries and agencies This article reports the results of a comparative analysis of the human resources management (HRM) autonomy of government agencies in Germany and Norway. Whereas the academic literature largely focuses on ministry–age...

There is little doubt that the process of European integration has resulted in a complex system of multilevel governance. Much has been said about the promises and pitfalls of an ever-increasing delegation of powers to the European Union (EU). However, scholars have only recently started to grasp the transformative effects of the integration proces...

This article reports the results of a comparative analysis of the human resources management (HRM) autonomy of government agencies in Germany and Norway. Whereas the academic literature largely focuses on ministry–agency relations in countries where agencies have been only recently established, these two countries have a long tradition of delegatio...

Im vorliegenden Kapitel wird der Untersuchungsgegenstand – verselbständigte Behörden in Deutschland und Norwegen und ihre Beziehungen zur aufsichtführenden Ministerialverwaltung – näher skizziert. Im Mittelpunkt stehen zunächst die Position der Behörden im jeweiligen Regierungssystem sowie die unterschiedlichen Rechtsformen verselbständigter Behörd...

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Kapitels steht die Frage, inwieweit organisatorische Merkmale zur Erklärung von behördlicher Autonomie bzw. ministerieller Steuerung verselbständigter Behörden beitragen. Damit wird ein Perspektivenwechsel vom Länder- zum Behördenvergleich vollzogen: Während bislang behördenübergreifende Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede zwisch...

Im vorliegenden Kapitel steht erstens die deskriptive Analyse der abhängigen Variablen und zweitens die empirische Überprüfung der in Kapitel 4 formulierten Annahmen zu den Unterschieden behördlicher Autonomie zwischen Deutschland und Norwegen im Mittelpunkt. Im Hinblick auf das zweistufige Forschungsdesign der Arbeit werden in Kapitel 5.1 die Erge...

The environment of national agencies has changed considerably in recent years as they increasingly become engaged in European Union networks. This article contributes to a growing body of literature on those networks and their effect on executive politics at the national level by asking whether and how the EU involvement of national agencies affect...

There is an extensive literature on the proliferation of agencies and the delegation of authority to such bodies across different countries. Much of this research asks whether New Public Management (NPM)-style agencification reforms have been implemented according to the original objectives, and what consequences – intended or unintended – the refo...

The article addresses how government agencies perceive their own role and relationship with their parent ministry in policy formulation. Although a growing body of literature suggests that agencies are frequently granted this type of policy autonomy from their parent ministries, there is little systematic knowledge about why some agencies have more...

The creation of executive agencies outside core departments has been a major element of administrative reforms throughout Europe during the past two decades, driven by a managerial logic, which also has been at the core of most academic works on “agencification.” In this article, the authors take a different perspective by focusing on executive age...

How can research agencies which are integrated into the hierarchical state apparatus provide credible expertise for policy‐decisions? In the case of governmental research agencies (GRAs) in Germany, this does not seem to pose a major problem, as their scientific credibility is taken for granted precisely because they belong to the Federal Governmen...

In an article published in PVS Ebinger and Schmitt (2010) investigate the effects of structural devolution to federal agencies on administrative performance. They address a topic which has not gained much attention in German-language public sector research. The authors perform a comprehensive and sound statistical analysis of unique survey data. Ho...

This chapter provides an overview of federal agencies in Germany, focusing on the different agency types, the historical development and the rationales for delegation to federal agencies, their autonomy and the control exercised by parent ministries, as well as an overview over recent debates and reforms.1 Most empirical information was collected v...

Although Germany does not figure among the ‘forerunners’ of managerial reforms of the public sector, it has a long tradition of agencies and non-departmental bodies at the federal level. Over time, the federal administration has developed into a highly differentiated ‘administrative zoo’ with a large number of species, questioning the image of a we...

Animals in the administrative zoo: organizational change and agency autonomy in Germany Although Germany does not figure among the ‘forerunners’ of managerial reforms of the public sector, it has a long tradition of agencies and non-departmental bodies at the federal level. Over time, the federal administration has developed into a highly different...

Im Unterschied zu Fragen der Arbeitsmarkt-, Wirtschafts- und Gesundheitspolitik, die von Politikern und Verwaltungsfachleuten, Parteien, Verbänden, Stiftungen, Wissenschaftlern und Bürgern intensiv diskutiert werden, findet ein Diskurs über konkrete Inhalte der Verwaltungspolitik meist nur in Expertenzirkeln statt. Verwaltungspolitische Themen gela...

This paper analyzes the effect of task characteristics, structural and cultural features on the agencies' role perceptions. I distinguish two role perceptions which are associated with different types of ministry-agency relations, namely the agency as policy-maker and the agency as expert. These distinct role perceptions are outlined in the followi...

Im Unterschied zu Fragen der Arbeitsmarkt-, Wirtschafts- und Gesundheitspolitik, die von Politikern und Verwaltungsfachleuten, Parteien, Verbänden, Stiftungen, Wissenschaftlern und Bürgern intensiv diskutiert werden, findet ein Diskurs über konkrete Inhalte der Verwaltungspolitik meist nur in Expertenzirkeln statt. Verwaltungspolitische Themen gela...

This chapter focuses on the autonomy of federal agencies in Germany in relation to their parent ministries. The academic debate on agencies has been strongly influenced by the practitioner’s model of agencification, which proposes high levels of management autonomy in combination with performance contracting as main ingredients for improving admini...

The comparative study comprises "public organisations outside core government" in seven EU Member States (Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) and the EU agencies. Federal agencies in the USA are considered briefly. The report deals with agency governance at the three levels of (1) institutional design a...

Behörden auf zentralstaatlicher Ebene — in der internationalen Diskussion als Agencies bezeichnet — sind derzeit ein hot topic in der empirischen und vergleichenden Verwaltungsforschung (siehe die BeitrÄge in Pollitt/ Talbot 2004; Pollitt et al. 2004). Ausgangspunkt dieser Diskussion ist die Beobachtung, dass derartige Organisationen in vielen Staa...