Strategic Policy Autonomy and Repeated Structural Reform: Do Reform Histories shape Perceptions of Goal Discretion in Senior Public Managers?

Through recurrent programs of structural reforms, governments continue their quest to design public organizations that will stand the test of their policy environments. One of the approaches to uncertain or politically sensitive issues has been to create various forms of (semi)autonomous agencies with substantial strategic discretion. However, while governments experiment with different designs, one might simultaneously expect that such repeated interference through structural change may limit the degree to which senior managers perceive their organization to be autonomous in terms of strategic decision-making. We propose that intense structural reforms may inadvertently reduce public organizations’ strategic policy autonomy through two mechanisms. On the one hand, intense sequences of structural reforms may lead to perceptions of a relatively controlling superior. On the other, they may reduce an organization’s ability to accrue resources beneficial to autonomy, such as a strong internal culture, network embeddedness and expertise. We examine this relationship in a sample of 44 public sector organizations, with results indicating that strategic policy autonomy will indeed be detrimentally affected for organizations that undergo intense sequences of structural reform. Methodology: Data from the Belgian State Administration Database will be used which includes information on the structural changes all Flemish PSOs experienced between 1995 and 2014. These data are supplemented with COBRA data which includes for the same organizations 2 waves of data on strategic policy autonomy. These data are examined using a difference-in- difference-in-differences estimator.