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Case studies indicate that national governments may be partly split so that national (regulatory) agencies operate in a 'double-hatted' manner, serving both ministerial departments and the European Commission when practicing EU legislation. Applying large-N questionnaire data this article follows up these studies by investigating how important various institutions are with respect to influencing national agencies when they are practicing EU legislation. How discretion is exercised at this stage of the policy process is not trivial; we demonstrate that also this activity is highly contested. Our main conclusion is that implementation of EU policies at the national level is neither solely indirect via national governments (as the standard portrayal says), nor solely direct (through Commission driven national agencies), nor solely networked (through transnational agency clusters).Implementation is indeed compound with several sources of power represented more or less simultaneously.2

Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to reduce political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards the robustness of these findings. In this article we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from executive politicians than their counterparts within ministerial (cabinet-level) departments. This finding holds when we control for variation in tasks, the political salience of issue areas and officials' rank. Simultaneously we observe that the three control variables all have an independent effect on officials' attentiveness to a steer from above. In addition we find that the more organizational capacity available within the respective ministerial departments, the more agency personnel tend to assign weight to signals from the political leadership. We apply large-N questionnaire data at three points in time; spanning two decades and shifting administrative doctrines.

Political science is often criticized for being insufficiently relevant for coping with governance challenges of our time. This book aims to fill this void by launching a general organizational approach to public governance. To achieve this, the book outlines key theoretical dimensions that cut across governance structures and processes horizontally as well as vertically, thus paving the way for integrating separate empirical analyses into a coherent theoretical whole. Moreover, the organizational (independent) variables outlined in this book represent classical dimensions in the organization literature that are generic in character. This allows for generalizations across time and space. The volume addresses how organizational characteristics of the governmental apparatus (within international organizations, the European Union, national governments, and sub-governments) systematically enable, constrain, and shape public governance processes, thus making some policy choices more likely than others. The second ambition of the volume is to focus on (organizational) design implications: By building systematic knowledge on how organizational factors shape governance processes on the one hand, and how organizational factors themselves might be deliberately changed on the other, the book offers a knowledge base for organizational design.

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