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.

The 2004 Constitutional Treaty features an 'early warning system' (EWS) in which national parliaments will scrutinize European legislative proposals to assess whether they comply with the principle of subsidiarity. In constructivist terms, this procedure effectively sets up the Commission and the national parliaments as interlocutors in an argument over when and how the EU should legislate. At a minimum, this system -which should be expanded to include proportionality -will alleviate the 'democratic deficit' by enhancing the parliamentary scrutiny of EU legislation. If it works well, it will improve the subsidiarity compliance of EU legislation and produce a clearer substantive definition of the principle.

In May 2012 national parliaments of the EU issued their first yellow card under the Early Warning Mechanism of the Treaty of Lisbon. A sufficient number of them raised objections to a legislative proposal-the Monti II Regulation regarding the right to strike-that the Commission was required to review the proposal, which it subsequently withdrew. This outcome was, demonstrably, not a coincidence but the product of extensive interparliamentary coordination, enabled by the initiative of one determined parliament (Denmark's Folketing), a well-timed COSAC meeting, and the network of national parliament representatives in Brussels. A dynamic political process was set in motion in which a number of parliaments joined the effort to obtain a yellow card by, in effect, "voting against" Monti II before the eight-week deadline.

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Article 13 of the Fiscal Treaty (2012) prompted the creation of an interparliamentary conference to discuss and oversee the EU's post-crisis regime of economic governance. However, the first meeting of the "Article 13 Conference," in October 2013, was beset by conflict. Surprisingly, the main cleavage was not a leftright debate over economic policy (e.g. pro-vs. anti-austerity) but a debate about the nature and purpose of the conference itself. This pitted the European Parliament, preferring a weak conference with a narrow mandate, against a number of national parliaments that preferred a strong conference with a broad mandate. This cleavage was apparent in a series of constitutional, institutional and procedural disagreements which arose over the course of the setting-up of the Article 13 Conference, many of which remained unresolved even after its second and third meetings, in January and September 2014. At the root of this struggle lay competing visions for the parliamentary oversight of the EU: should scrutiny be centralized in the EP, or should there be a new system of joint scrutiny involving the EP and national parliaments together?