The paper starts by discussing what I think most students of government hold to be the most characteristic features of development over the last couple of decades; namely ‘agencification’ and fragmentation of national governments. Interestingly, when dealing with the problems such a...

Establishing separate executive bodies of a confederation or of a nascent federation of states seems in many respects to be the ‘hard case’ of institution-building. This article argues that ‘agencification’ at the EU level is basically about increasing the potential for more uniform...

Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to undermine political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards the robustness of these findings. In this paper we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from...