Formal independence of regulatory agencies andVarieties ofCapitalism: A case of institutional complementarity?

Abstract

The Varieties of Capitalism literature posits that national economic institutions reflect the mode of coordination of a country's market actors. Despite the importance of this claim and a rich literature on the emergence of regulatory capitalism, few studies test such prediction for Independent Regulatory Agencies (IRAs). This article connects the two fields of research by analysing the impact of economic coordination on the formal independence of IRAs. The results show that, beyond issues of credible commitment and policy stability, the collective action capacity of market actors matters. In particular, regulators in Coordinated Market Economies enjoy less independence than in Liberal Market Economies, while intermediate regimes grant IRAs the least autonomy. The policy implications are nontrivial. Similar to other macroeconomic institutions, inappropriate combinations of economic coordination and IRA independence may engender Pareto-suboptimal regulatory solutions. In such cases, policymakers should reconsider the rules governing national regulators

Explaining regulatory autonomy in EU network sectors: Varieties of utility regulation?

“…The results confirm the findings of a previous study (Guardiancich & Guidi, 2016) that reports lower levels of formal independence in CMEs than in LMEs for the dimension of regulatory autonomy. The more coordinated an economy the lower the level of regulatory autonomy granted to network regulators.…”

“…Based on a rather dynamic reading of the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach, it can be expected that different types of capitalism respond differently to reforms toward new modes of economic governance and that institutional innovations are adjusted to and affected by the existing political-economic institutional environment (Eckert, 2010). A number of studies have started to assess more systematically the extent to which the type of capitalism affects regulators' formal independence (Guardiancich & Guidi, 2016;Guidi, 2014Guidi, , 2016. We expect the degree of coordination in an economy to impact also on the level of regulatory autonomy granted to European sector regulators.…”

“…In order to proxy the degree of economic coordination, we rely on employer density from the Data Base on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention and Social Pacts (ICTWSS) (Visser, 2016). These measures have been used, for instance, by Maggetti (2007), Hanretty and Koop (2013), and Guardiancich and Guidi (2016). The variable captures the organization density of employers as a proportion of employees in employment and, thus, a crucial dimension of countries' coordination capacity.…”

“…The figure displays 26 EU member states that appear in decreasing order according to the sum of regulatory autonomy in electricity, gas, rail, and telecommunication Furthermore, delegation patterns in the regulatory state may be embedded within and related to broader country-level institutional settings and "national path dependencies" (Maggetti & Verhoest, 2014). With few exceptions (Guardiancich & Guidi, 2016;Guidi, 2014Guidi, , 2016, the political-economic institutional structure has been so far neglected in the comparative public policy literature on bureaucratic autonomy and the regulatory state. Other scholars have set the privatization and delegation process into relation with administrative and legal traditions and institutions (Bianculli, Fernández-i-Marin, & Jordana, 2013;Bortolotti, Fantini, & Siniscalco, 2003).…”

The drivers of regulatory networking: policy learning between homophily and convergence

“…Recent contributions have argued that the "VoC" framework holds explanatory power with regard to market and regulatory arrangements in national network industries (Thatcher 2007;Guardiancich and Guidi 2016). The VoC framework subdivides countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) according to "the way in which firms resolve the coordination problems they face" (Hall and Soskice 2001, 7) in the country where they operate.…”