Agencification and Location: Does Agency Site Matter? Morten Egeberg & Jarle Trondal Published online: 26 March 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract Two decades of New Public Management have placed agencifiction high on the agenda of administrative policy-makers. However, agencification (and de- agencification) has been one of the enduring themes of public administration. Agencies organized at arm’ s length from ministerial departments have fairly often been located outside of the capital or political centre. Although practitioners tend to assign some weight to central versus peripheral location as regards political- administrative behavior, this relationship has been almost totally ignored by scholars in the field. In this paper, based on a large-N elite survey, we show that agency autonomy, agency influence and inter-institutional coordination seem to be relatively unaffected by agency site. This study also specifies some conditions under which this finding is valid. Keywords Agencification . Autonomy . Co-ordination . Influence . New public management . Site Introduction During the last couple of decades public administration has experienced a shift in the balance between bureaucratic autonomy and bureaucratic integration, marked by Public Organiz Rev (2011) 11:97–108 DOI 10.1007/s11115-010-0113-8 M. Egeberg Department of Political Science and ARENA—Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: morten.egeberg@stv.uio.no J. Trondal Department of Political Science and Management, University of Agder, Servicebox 422, 4604 Kristiansand, Norway J. Trondal (*) ARENA—Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: Jarle.trondal@uia.no