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AGENCIFICATION AND BLAME SHIFTING: EVALUATING A NEGLECTED SIDE OF PUBLIC SECTOR REFORMS
Author(s) -
MORTENSEN PETER B.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
public administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.313
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1467-9299
pISSN - 0033-3298
DOI - 10.1111/padm.12243
Subject(s) - blame , rhetoric , agency (philosophy) , politics , public sector , criticism , public administration , political science , empirical evidence , public relations , sociology , political economy , social psychology , psychology , law , social science , linguistics , philosophy , epistemology
The establishment of autonomous agencies has been a strong trend in the public sector across countries for about 25 years. In line with the official rhetoric accompanying such reforms, almost all reform evaluations have focused on various kinds of performance improvements. This article investigates a set of behavioural consequences of such reforms, which have been claimed by the blame avoidance literature, but have never been subjected to systematic empirical analysis. In particular, the article examines how a reform of agencification influences the propensity of agency managers to blame the political principals when the agency is subject to public criticism. Furthermore, it examines how the reform influences the blaming rhetoric of ministers and MPs . To evaluate such reform effects systematically, the article introduces a new empirical approach and illustrates the utility of the approach in a case study of the transformation of the national Danish railway company from 1995 to 2007.