What is it about?
The article examines postal regulation in three EU countries, namely Germany, France and the UK. It asks two questions: First, how politicians have delegated regulatory powers to independent agencies. Second, how these regulators do operate in practice. It examines formal arrangements in depth, and compares de facto independence and regulatory practice. The conceptual framework combines the literatures on delegation and comparative capitalism.
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Why is it important?
The evidence from postal regulation in these countries reveals a striking discrepancy between formal arrangements and actual regulatory practice. We would not easily predict the ways in which regulators operate based on their formal independence. In order to grasp the dynamics post-delegation, the varieties of capitalism typology proves more fruitful than the expectations derived from the literature on delegation. The paper points to the importance to study the dynamic and longitudinal effects of institutional settings.
Perspectives
When developing this paper I started out from the regulatory governance literature, but became more interested in wider political economy questions. The political science literature on regulatory agencies has developed a strong focus on institutional arrangements, and in particular formal independence from the political arena. Yet this captures only part of the picture, as these supposedly independent institutions operate in a wider socio-economic context and engage in multiple relations with a wide array of actors. I have thus become more interested in the politics of regulation in the post-delegation phase, building on the insights from research on comparative capitalism.
Professor Sandra Eckert
Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Between commitment and control: varieties of delegation in the European postal sector, Journal of European Public Policy, December 2010, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2010.513581.
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