ABSTRACT
The general development is pervasive enough to have been described in a recent work as a global "rise of the unelected" and a new form of separation of powers that challenges familiar understandings of representative democracy. Expertise features largely in the panoply of agencification, the main line of argument being that of specialization: politicians either would need, as a "second-order decisional strategy", to rely on specialized, expert knowledge or to delegate sectorial problem solving entirely to experts. Some more recent developments, notably judicial councils, overlap with the horizontal division of the classical branches of power and constitute in this sense liminal examples of agencification. Administrative boards, commissions, and tribunals are a mainstay of the regulatory state. Just as in the United States the movement towards regulation by independent commissions significantly receded, neutral bodies were created in growing numbers in other parts of the world.
