Abstract
Integrated markets and shared legal frameworks at the EU level have increasingly required national regulators to adopt similar regulatory practices. The paper suggests that this requirement bears an over-looked and under-theorized pitfall: national regulators may have different types of expertise, which can shape their response to harmonization pressures. While regulators have agency over their expertise in line with their financial and organizational autonomy, the paper suggests that changes to the make-up of their expertise are costly due to organizational path-dependencies rooted in national administrative traditions and regulatory styles. The paper uses the case of banking supervisors in the UK and Germany to illustrate the relevance of this argument. Based on an original data set of over 1000 UK and German banking supervisory officials, it verifies the usefulness of this theorization of regulatory expertise. The findings suggest that national regulators in the EU may require more flexibility to combine effective regulatory practices with the demands of harmonization.
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