Drawing on insights from literature on bureaucratic reputation, the project aims to challenge, re-conceptualise and redefine core foundational assumptions of the European regulatory state. The regulatory state discourse has evolved in isolation from, and overlooked key insights from, reputation-based approaches on bureaucratic behaviour and ‘the politics of reputation’. A reputational lens has potentially wide-ranging and fundamental implications for our understanding of the regulatory state’s legitimising credentials, for our conceptualisation of its key features and their interrelation. More specifically, this project looks at its implications for our understanding of the link between agency insulation and regulatory credibility, for our understanding of public accountability and the main drivers of behaviour in accountability, with consequences for the relationship between regulatory independence and accountability.
Reputation-based accounts emphasise the key role of reputation, of organisational image, to understanding organisational behaviour and the authority public bodies are able to build in governance. For public organisations (such as regulatory agencies), the successful cultivation of a strong reputation becomes critical to securing regulatory authority beyond formal fiat. In this understanding, the reputation a public organisation cultivates—in its responses to expectations from multiple audiences in its environment—is the primary source of its power, which can allow it to enlist public support, build its autonomy, protect it from external attacks and ultimately, help ensure its survival. The study of reputation is thus of fundamental relevance to understanding public bureaucracies.
A core assumption that the project examines is that of the ink between agency insulation and regulatory credibility, re-assessing what shapes stakeholders' perceptions of regulatory outputs. Within dominant understandings, regulatory credibility is said to be premised on agency insulation from politics: independent bodies alone, operating at arm’s length from traditional controls, can secure credible regulation. This assumption has had fundamental systemic implications in practice: the independent agency model has become the defining model for organising regulation across jurisdictions, with significant implications for the structural makeup of nation states and for the rise of non-majoritarianism. Surprisingly, this assumption has not been directly empirically tested. We put the assumption to rigorous empirical testing: Does higher regulatory independence result in higher perceived credibility of regulatory outputs among agency stakeholders?
