There is a rich scholarship investigating the formal regulatory independence as an outcome of particular institutional arrangements of National Regulatory Authorities for various utility sectors. In contrast, the establishment of national media authorities has only recently stimulated the academic debate on the links between formal independence and institutional design. No empirical measurements have yet been done to scrutinise the independence of audiovisual media regulators in Europe. This article addresses this gap and provides a first empirical assessment of the cross-country variations in formal independence of national media regulators. The analysis is based on an original data set comprising formal independence scores for 43 National Regulatory Authorities which were created by the year 2014. It is demonstrated that institutional differences among National Regulatory Authorities mirror different levels of formal independence, which varies across countries.
This article discusses the role played by regulatory intermediaries including non-state actors, professional associations and transnational networked agencies during the transposition of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive into Spanish national legislation. It aims to fill in the gap in prior research by extending the application of the Regulator–Intermediary–Target (RIT) theoretical framework to the field of audiovisual media regulation. The analysis focuses on the transposition stages of the Directive after the date of entering into force on 19 December 2018, up to 19 September 2020. Data are taken from publicly available national sources and European databases. Results show that the RIT framework helps to single out the main initiatives undertaken by relevant Spanish authorities and institutional players, their methods and responses to policy challenges. Mapping out regulatory intermediaries and network of relationships established among multiple actors facilitates our understanding on the complex forms of audiovisual governance and implementation of European law.
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