Regulating Regulatory Organizations: Controlling Norwegian Civil Service Organizations

This paper describes the regulatory agencies in Norway as part of the population of Norwegian state agencies by focusing on who controls and on what is controlled and how. We analyze whether regulatory agencies are regulated and controlled to different degrees, by different external actors, and in different ways than other agencies and on whether this control focuses on different aspects. We also examine whether the variation in perceived regulation and control according to type of agency task is sustained if we control for structural and cultural features. The empirical basis is a broad survey of Norwegian state agencies carried out in 2004 and the theoretical approach embraces task-specific, structural-instrumental, and cultural-institutional perspectives. We find that regulatory tasks represent a major activity for government agencies in Norway and that external control by both the executive and by the legislative bodies of agencies is rather significant. Moreover, in contrast to what we would expect, given current regulatory orthodoxy, regulatory agencies are controlled to a larger extent than other agencies