Does agency age matter in administrative reform?: Policy autonomy and public management in Swedish agencies

This paper looks at the policy autonomy of different “generations” of agencies in Sweden. Taking a historical institutional perspective, we argue that the policy autonomy of public agencies is related to the dominant political and administrative trends at the time when the agency was first created, i.e. that institutional relations created at that formative moment tend to persist. In the Swedish context, one such trend is of particular importance; the managerial trend that started in 1963 with the Program Budgeting (PB) reform. This was an institutional reform that presented a paradigm shift in Swedish public administration. This reform was reinforced in the 1990s by the New Public Management (NPM) reform, which introduced new instruments and measures consistent with the managerial paradigm previously introduced by the PB reform. This managerial trend aimed at limiting agencies’ policy autonomy. Thus, we hypothesise that (1) agencies founded before the PB reform will enjoy more extensive policy autonomy than agencies founded during or after this reform and (2) there will be no such difference between agencies founded before and after the NPM reform. These hypotheses are tested on empirical data consisting of a web survey in which 157 Swedish agencies have stated to what extent they perceive that they enjoy policy autonomy. The results confirm both our hypotheses, thus demonstrating the importance of considering the scope of institutional change when analysing and comparing the effects of administrative reforms in different countries.