Patterns of Control in the Romanian Executive Agencies: An Exploratory Research

Abstract

The paper explores the patterns of Romanian ministerial control over executive agencies, based on the data collected in 2010 using the COBRA survey. Seven research questions were constructed starting from the major theories existing in the field aimed at describing and understanding the control patterns. The paper’s main conclusion is that ministries still prefer ex ante types of control in exchange to those after-the-fact, although some rather incremental shifts toward ex post control can be noticed.

Keywords

• romania
• autonomy
• ex post and ex ante control
• executive agencies
• trust
• rewards
• sanctions
• performance measurement
• accountability