Non-departmental public bodies in Italy: characteristics and determinants of autonomy

Trends to specialisation and structural disaggregation are transforming the landscape of the public sector, characterized by a number of bodies – the public agencies - that operate in a relatively autonomous way from the core government (ministries or departments). This tendency to establish specialised bodies that enjoy different degrees of autonomy has raised a number of concerns. The paper investigates the factors influencing the autonomy of public agencies. It emerges a faceted picture, in which some factors may account, to some extent, for variations in one or a subset of the dimensions of autonomy, but generally not for all the dimensions of autonomy, nor for the entirety or most part of the variation. The path of exploring structural factors seems to be the most promising for explaining the autonomy of agencies