Kaufman famously described government agencies as “immortal,” meaning once established their continuation is assured. Many studies have examined this claim by attempting to identify patterns of organizational change in modern government and their underlying causes; however, these works overwhelmingly focus on Western contexts, with only a few case studies being available for Asia and other global regions. Accordingly, this paper aims to expand the scope of this body of research by focusing on transitions in government agencies in an Asian context, namely Japan.

The post-war Japanese government was modernized according to the Westminster model, and since 2000, began to reform its public agencies—known as “Incorporated Administrative Agencies” (IAAs)—in line with the New Public Management model that was gaining global traction at that time. Despite the Western origin of such reforms, Japan’s political-administrative institutions have some unique features that set them aside from their Western counterparts while having parallels with other Asian countries. It is thus essential to analyze how these non-western institutional factors affect the organizational changes of government agencies for a better understanding of the organizational transitions inside government. With that aim in mind, this study addresses the following research questions: 1) What are the major forms of organizational transition in the case of Japan’s IAAs? 2) What are the major factors that determine their survival/death? 3) How do non-western features of government affect agency transition? 4) What is the role of political leadership in this context? To answer these questions, we developed a survival dataset of IAAs from 2001 to 2022, which includes key political and administrative variables.

Our analysis suggests that political leaders (i.e., prime ministers) tend to pursue non-structural cosmetic transitions of agencies, such as renaming/rebranding, as part of broader public service reform packages. However, political longevity is an important factor here, since leaders whose tenure is short tend to make little or no impact. Our findings shed light not only on the internal workings of Japanese government, but also on the importance of local political realities in shaping patterns of agency transition, and thus helps to broaden the scope of the research in this field beyond western contexts.

The effectiveness of regulatory policy in many areas depends on citizens adhering to the advice and decisions of regulatory bodies. For example, central banks aim to affect citizens’ borrowing and saving behavior to ensure financial and monetary stability; energy regulators encourage citizens to adopt renewable energy sources as part of broader energy transitions; and pharmaceutical regulators play a major role in the fight against infectious diseases, among others, through the certification of vaccines’ safety and efficacy, critical to vaccine uptake by populations at large. Citizens’ compliance to regulatory recommendations depends on whether they perceive these as credible. One of the biggest threats to the credibility of regulatory advice is the concern that recommendations are tainted by short-term political interests. Consequently, regulation literature argues that endowing regulators with independence provides the answer to securing regulatory credibility, and thus enhancing citizens’ compliance. However, extant research provides us with little evidence for this theoretical assumption, pointing at need for thorough empirical investigation.

We put this assumption to rigorous empirical testing, utilizing a case that is a prime example of reliance on the credibility in regulatory decision-making: the conditional marketing authorization of the first COVID-19 vaccine in the European Union (EU), following the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) risk assessment in December 2021. We pre-registered and conducted a large survey experimental study among 4,000 citizens in four EU countries. We conducted the study shortly after EMA’s approval of the vaccine. We hypothesize that citizens’ perception of the credibility of the decision to approve the vaccine and their willingness to get vaccinated are shaped by their perceptions regarding the independence of EMA. We examine this hypothesis both observationally and experimentally. We find a positive correlation between citizens’ perception of EMA’s independence and the credibility of its scientific assessment, as well as their willingness to take the vaccine. Yet, these correlations are relatively weak, not entirely consistent across all country samples, and do not ‘survive’ the experimental tests. We further examine the moderation of these effects by individuals’ prior perceptions regarding vaccines.

These results indicate that the empirical basis for the widely held assumption that independence should result in enhanced regulatory credibility may not be as evident as previously thought. This would mean that we cannot rely on independence alone to secure citizens' willingness to comply with crucial regulatory advice such as taking a life-saving vaccine.

Countries all over the world have created large numbers of executive agencies in the past decades. While their rise, characteristics and issues are well described for OECD and developing countries, our knowledge about agencies in developing countries is very limited. In this paper I will describe the different types of agencies in Suriname, formal and informal motives for their establishment, and some information about their performance, accountability and other issues. Data are based on a limited number of official sources (mostly legislation) and informal interviews. The findings show that there are three types of executive agencies: foundations, sui generis, and state-owned companies. These have often been established because of market failure or for patronage purposes. A recent report shows that the majority of agencies is in heavy financial debt. Privatization is discussed as a potential solution.