According to Hypothesis 7, independent agencies dealing with more complex policy issues should be subject to lower degrees of formal political accountability. No support for this hypothesis is found in the analysis. Hence whilst Elgie and McMenamin (2005) find that French agencies which operate in more complex issue areas indeed have higher degrees of formal independence, no relation between complexity and formal political accountability is found in this study. This may be because the degree of complexity is not as important a factor in the Netherlands as it is in France, but it may also be that the measure of complexity – operationalized in terms of expertise requirements – suits the Dutch context less well.