Do regulatory agencies (RAs) improve the performance of public policies? Are there some characteristics of RAs that trigger their effectiveness? This paper aims to uncover these questions, introducing a new database of RA features derived from a large sample of cases including 115 countries and 17 sectors. We suggest that four different characteristics of agencies can have direct impacts on the performance of public policies. These characteristics operate as causal chains to connect the institutional profile of agencies with the outcome of the policy instruments they implement. First, disturbances created by political cycles affect agencies less than other public organisations, because of the independence protection, and this may facilitate better performance in the long run. Second, agencies may have more protection against potential capture and private interest involvement by powerful stakeholders, thanks to their organisational capacities. Third, agencies integrate different regulatory and supervisory capabilities, achieving results that are more effective. Fourth, agencies face strong accountability challenges, assuming more transparency and legitimacy claims than traditional bureaucracies.
Varieties of capitalist approach allow us to consider, for example, if similar agencies have a different role in different economies, or whether coordinated economies have much more effective risk-oriented agencies than liberal economies. Thus, we make use of our dataset of institutional characteristics of regulatory agencies to capture how some agencies may create a more intense impact on the outputs of the policies they contribute to move forward. Our analysis is cross-country, as we have only a single observation about each agency, referring to the end of the year 2010. Thus, we expect that countries having already established agencies at that moment, showing more characteristics enhancing their impact, will be able to show their traces in countries the years after, mediated by the capitalist character of each country.
