There is now a rich literature on the proliferation of agencies and the delegation of authority to such bodies across different countries. However, most of this research lacks an explicit link to the literature on the policy making functions of public bureaucracies, which touches upon the fundamental question of the relationship between politics and administration. The paper addresses this subject by focusing on the role of executive agencies in policy making. More precisely, it analyses patterns of interaction between executive agencies and ministerial departments in the formulation phase of the policy process. Most analyses of this phenomenon usually address agencies within the same national context. However, there is reason to believe that contextual factors influence the role and importance of executive agencies in the policy formulation stage. The paper takes an internationally comparative perspective by comparing ministry-agency relations in Germany and Norway, using material drawn from semi-structured expert interviews and comprehensive surveys. These two countries have long traditions of hierarchically subordinate executive agencies at the national level of government, and they share roughly similar administrative traditions. However, in spite of broadly similar administrative traditions, the paper shows that different norms of appropriateness regarding the role of executive agencies in policy making prevail. Also, the research shows that management reforms – which were implemented in Norway to greater extent than in Germany – do not seem to have a substantial effect on ministry-agency relations in policy formulation.
