When, why and how do bureaucrats and politicians respond to reputational threats? Comparing Central Government Organizations in Denmark and Belgium/Flanders'.

Whereas the creation and institutionalization of semi-autonomous agencies with increasing degrees of organizational autonomy has been a global trend for more than two decades, an partially opposite international trend of increased saliency of these agencies resulting in de-agencification, agency mergers, and reducing agency autonomy becomes recently observable. In this joint four-year research project by prof. dr. Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen (Denmark), prof.dr. Koen Verhoest and dr. Jan Boon (both UAntwerpen), financed by the Danish Agency for Science, Research and Innovation, we connect these observations with theoretical insights of bureaucratic theory, as elaborated by Daniel Carpenter, George Krause and Moshe Maor. In order to test and further develop central claims made in bureaucratic reputation theory, this project consists of two distinct yet integrated parts. First a medium-N study, including the quantitative analysis of hypotheses on whether threats to different aspects of an agency's reputation affect the various types of communication responses from different types of agencies with different kinds of tasks. In this part we test acclaimed theoretical insights which were derived from regulatory agencies in US and Israeli context by studying agencies with different kinds of tasks in different politico-administrative settings. Second a multiple-case study, using process-tracing methods to identify whether an accumulation of reputational threats to agencies results in political decisions at the detriment of agencies.

Keywords:ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE

Disciplines:Other economics and business, Citizenship, immigration and political inequality, International and comparative politics, Multilevel governance, National politics, Political behaviour, Political organisations and institutions, Political theory and methodology, Public administration, Other political science

Project type:Collaboration project