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Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory Advance Access published online on April 1, 2009
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, doi:10.1093/jopart/mup002
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Institutional Design and Formal Autonomy: Political versus Historical and Cultural Explanations

Kutsal Yesilkagit

University of Utrecht

Jørgen G. Christensen

University of Aarhus

Address correspondence to the author at a.k.yesilkagit{at}uu.nl.

This article tests two competing hypotheses in the study of the institutional design of regulatory agencies. Political explanations consider the degree of institutional design of regulatory agencies as a function of political factors, such as the degree of policy conflict and political uncertainty. By contrast, historical-cultural explanations of institutional design claim that the design of regulatory agencies is a function of path dependency and national administrative traditions. In this article, we test these hypotheses on a data set of 293 regulatory agencies that were created between 1945 and 2000 in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. We find strong support for historical-cultural explanations, while our findings suggest that political factors play almost no role in the institutional design of regulatory agencies within parliamentary regimes.


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