Objective
RICA will fundamentally challenge, reconceptualise and redefine core foundational assumptions of the regulatory state. Arm’s length governance and regulatory independence have become the cornerstone normative and institutional design principles of the European regulatory state. Regulatory credibility is premised on agency insulation from politics with major systemic implications in the form of a rise in non-majoritarianism and a parallel devaluation of the political process. Efforts to compensate through alternative sources of input legitimacy have proven challenging. Conceptualised in a rational-choice tradition, accountability is seen to be in a zero-sum relationship with regulatory autonomy. Bolstering accountability is said to threaten autonomy, undermining the system’s normative foundations.
Informed by insights from the political science literature on reputation, RICA profoundly questions these assumptions. It does so in two separate and interlocking tracks. Module 1 theorises about, and tests, the established wisdom of a wholesale positive relation between agency insulation and credibility. To the contrary, from a reputational perspective, a strategy of insulation is expected to have a negative effect on regulatory credibility, with overall delegitimising effects. Similarly informed by reputation insights, Module 2 challenges dominant understandings of accountability and puts forward the building blocks of a new theory of public accountability. The module draws out and studies empirically how reputation shapes the accountability behaviour of regulatory actors, both account-holders and account-givers, and their interactions. It will re-conceptualise the role played by accountability in the regulatory state as well as its relationship with autonomy. In contrast to dominant understandings, as a mechanism of reputation-building, accountability can reinforce autonomy with sweeping implications for regulatory control strategies and institutional design choices.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback.
You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Keywords
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands