Policy and Management Autonomy of Federal Agencies in Germany

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the autonomy of federal agencies in Germany in relation to their parent ministries. The academic debate on agencies has been strongly influenced by the practitioner’s model of agencification, which proposes high levels of management autonomy in combination with performance contracting as main ingredients for improving administrative effectiveness and efficiency (Pollitt et al. 2004; Talbot 2004). However, numerous studies show that the ideal-type agency is hard to find in reality (Pollitt et al. 2004; Verschuere 2007; Roness et al. 2008; Verhoest et al. 2010). Also, it soon became apparent that agencies and other types of autonomous public organizations have existed for a long time in many countries (Hood and Schuppert 1988; Bouckaert and Peters 2004; Wettenhall 2005). This is also the case in Germany, where federal agencies have a long history going back to the second half of the 19th century. This research takes the agencification debate as its point of departure and examines the autonomy of federal agencies from different theoretical perspectives.

I would like to thank Morten Egeberg, Birgitta Niklasson, Jon Pierre, Christoph Reichard, and the editors of this volume for their very useful comments on earlier versions of this chapter, and Markus Seyfried for his invaluable help with the data analysis.