Investigating the ‘NPM-ness’ of agencies in Italy and Flanders

Abstract

Autonomous bodies established by or reformed under NPM-inspired reforms should be, from a normative point of view, characterized by (1) structural disaggregation, (2) managerial freedom, (3) contractual relationships with the oversight authorities, and (4) tasks on the operations side of the policy-operations divide. We aim to investigate the extent to which real-life agencies reflect these normative characteristics, by taking as an empirical setting the Flemish and Italian public sectors. Our findings suggest that in reality, the normative NPM ideal type agency is only rarely observed. Secondly, we want to explore the effect of the country, the age, and the tasks of the agency on the extent to which it reflects the characteristics of the NPM ideal-type. We find that Italian agencies better reflect the ideal type compared to their Flemish counterparts, and that there is virtually no effect of agencies' age and tasks on the extent to which they reflect the NPM ideal typical agency.

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