Regulatory Agencies and Networks in Europe

The emergence of regulatory agencies is widely considered as the institutional hallmark of the regulatory state and has attracted considerable academic attention. Moreover, research shows that national regulatory agencies are increasingly integrated into transnational regulatory networks. This paper argues that research on regulatory agencies and networks is based on an implicit assumption that regulatory agencies are a distinct ‘species’ of organisations that can be studied without considering other types of agencies. A key insight is that comparative perspectives including regulatory and executive agencies are important to put regulatory scholarship into context and to flesh out the contribution of regulatory scholarship to advance general knowledge on public administration. The paper illustrates such comparative perspectives by reviewing literature on the formal and actual autonomy of agencies, the effect of transnational networks on national agencies, and multilevel coordination in administrative networks