European coordination and harmonization is pivotal for an effective regulation of the common market. Hence, European administrative networks are mushrooming, either because the national agencies see a necessity to coordinate by themselves or the Commission fosters the establishment of networks to rely on their administrative capacities. However, recent quantitative empirical research shows that national agencies gain autonomy from their parent ministries when becoming involved in European networks. However, the quantitative approach was not able to answer the question of what causal mechanisms account for this effect. To solve this puzzle the paper compares three fields, in which national agencies are involved in dense European networks: financial market regulation, energy and telecommunications regulation. In each of these sectors, a network of national regulators plays in important role within the European rule-making and rule-implementation processes, however these networks are embedded in a different institutional setting. Whereas in the energy and the financial market sector a European agency has been created recently, which is however embedded in different decision-making procedures, in the telecommunications sector the network is only formalized within an expert advisory committee. The main theoretical argument of the paper is that involvement in European networks exacerbates the information asymmetry between the national agency and its parent ministry. The paper argues that the involvement in European networks creates special patterns of information asymmetry, which do also depend on the kind of institutional embedding of the network. These information asymmetries aggravate the control problem of ministries and can even be exploited strategically by agencies, with far reaching consequences for the process of multi-level coordination. The empirical analysis is based on a broad range of interviews with civil servants in the three fields as well as on a survey conducted in the respective national agencies.
