Autonomous Agencies, Happy Citizens? Challenging the Satisfaction Claim

Abstract

Is the delegation of public services to semi‐autonomous agencies associated with increased citizen satisfaction? This article assesses three theoretical routes that might link the two: responsiveness, credible commitment, and blame deflection. The article draws on data from the European Social Survey and an expert survey about delegation of tax and police services to semi‐autonomous agencies in 15 countries. No supporting evidence was found for the responsiveness and credible commitment theories. Yet semi‐autonomous agencies sometimes can absorb or deflect blame for bad performance. In the tax case, dissatisfied service users blame the agency, rather than the government. The presence of an agency worked as a scapegoat for dissatisfied service users and resulted in less dissatisfaction with the government in countries where tax services were delegated.

Citizen satisfaction under changing political leadership: The role of partisan motivated reasoning

“…This presumption gets further support from key insights of the blame attribution literature (e.g., Hood, ; Malhotra & Kuo, ; McGraw, ; Mortensen, ; Weaver, ). Indeed, functional responsibility, and consecutively blame, is attributed to political principals even when causal responsibility is delegated to third parties (James, Jilke, Petersen, & Van de Walle, ; Marvel & Girth, ; but see also Overman, ). Yet, when lines of responsibility get blurred, blame tends to weaken (see also Jilke, Petrovsky, Meuleman, & James, ).…”

Business techniques as an explanation of the autonomy-performance link in corporatized entities: evidence from Dutch Municipally owned corporations

“…Our finding that managerial autonomy has an ambiguous effect on performance in municipally owned corporations (MOCs) is in line with the conflicting evidence found in the literature on local corporatization (cf. Cambini et al 2011;Da Cruz and Marques 2011;P erez-L opez, Prior, and Zafra-G omez 2015;Swarts and Warner 2014;Torsteinsen et al 2018;Van Thiel 2017, 2020) and on agencification (Egeberg and Trondal 2009;Nelson and Nikolakis 2012;Overman 2017;Overman and Van Thiel 2016;Van Thiel et al 2012;Verhoest 2005;Vining, Laurin, and Weimer 2015;. Also in MOCs, there might be a tradeoff between the potential efficacy gain provided by avoiding the politicization of service delivery and the performance loss that may result from increased information asymmetries in the steering relationship between the political principal and the corporation.…”

“…Verhoest (2005) finds that autonomy is performance-enhancing in Flemish public agencies in specific conditions. Overman and Van Thiel (2016) find output losses as a result of agencification in a systematic comparison of 20 countries, and Overman (2017) finds no evidence of satisfaction gains from agencification in a survey of 15 countries. Nelson and Nikolakis (2012) find a positive link between autonomy and performance in state forest agencies in Australia.…”

The Formal Delegation of Regulatory Decisions in the Telecommunication Sector: An Explanation Using Classification Trees

“…Research on the regulation of liberalized markets has traditionally focused on studying the delegation of regulatory competencies from political principals (cabinet, ministers) to an independent regulatory agency based on the argument that this ensures a government's credible commitment to liberalization (D'Arcy & Nistotskaya, ; Overman, ; Yesilkagit, ). Hence, the emphasis of this research tradition has been more on organizational aspects, with particular attention paid to the characteristics of these sectoral regulatory agencies (such as independence and regulatory competencies).…”

“…Credible Commitment— The main theoretical perspective belonging to fiduciary logic is credible commitment (Baldwin, Cave, & Lodge, ; Overman, ). However, this explanation may not hold for all types of regulation.…”