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Termination, aggregation, or replacement? A competing risks approach to agency transitions
Author(s) -
Yesilkagit Kutsal
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
governance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.46
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1468-0491
pISSN - 0952-1895
DOI - 10.1111/gove.12532
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , variety (cybernetics) , politics , value (mathematics) , business , political science , sociology , computer science , law , social science , artificial intelligence , machine learning
Agencies operate in highly volatile and uncertain environments. Changing political coalitions and sudden crises may result in the reorganization of agencies. Under these circumstances, agencies may experience a variety of structural transitions. The uncertainties and the inevitability of compromises, however, deem it difficult to predict which of all possible forms of structural change agencies will experience. In this article, we develop and test competing risks models that aim to capture situations in which administrative agencies may experience one out of range of possible transitions. The models are tested on dataset of 483 agencies established between 1945 and 2012 in the Netherlands. Our main finding is that the different transitions that agencies can experience have different underlying causal processes. Herewith the study empirically demonstrates that agency reorganization is not a binary choice between life and death and shows the value of competing risks approaches to the agency termination literature.