Growing interest in the institutionalization of evaluations in the public administration sector raises the question of institutionalization models which offer optimal conditions for the use of evaluations. The presented article deals with this question. It is supported by a broad-based examination of more than 90 percent of the 300 evaluations which the Swiss Federal Administration completed in the years between 1999 and 2002. The evaluation of the data includes descriptive, bivariate and multivariate analyses. The results of the study suggest that the use of evaluations benefits from an institutionalization which maintains a short distance between the evaluators and the users of evaluations. Moreover, there is little evidence of an increase in the chances of evaluation results being utilized if the institutionalization attaches importance to distance and independence between the evaluators and the evaluees.