Ministerial bureaucracies as stand-in agenda setters? A comparative description

"This paper sets out to theoretically conceptualise and empirically describe the potential ability of ministerial bureaucracies to influence policy-making. The theoretical framework describes the chances for bureaucracies to influence policy-making as accruing from three sources: the organisational structures of the bureaucracy itself, room for bureaucratic discretion resulting from the preference configurations of the political actors, and the chance for the bureaucracy to act as political agenda setter rather than politicians. A quantitative empirical description of 21 OECD-countries is pres... Mehr ...