Study title

We studied accountability, autonomy and several organizational variables as perceived by CEO's of agencies in seven advanced democracies: Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. We selected 1,096 agencies at the national level in those countries. We circulated an invitation to take part in the electronic survey among the agency heads between May and December 2017. We received a total of 661 responses, of which 496 were fully completed. Additional data on the institutional relationship between agencies and parent departments was collected from various external sources. This part of the data-collection was finished in March 2018. In most countries, a response rate of about 50% was achieved and there was an overall response rate of 45%. The survey was translated to the various national languages, except for Switzerland where we used an English version.