The Global Dimension of Domestic Regulatory Agencies: A Networked Perspective of Political Legitimacy

Many Domestic Regulatory Agencies (DRAs) have intensified the use of international cooperation mechanisms and, increasingly, their decisions have a global impact. These mechanisms are very diverse, ranging from participation in supranational regulatory agencies to mutual recognition agreements or even unilateral cooperation. Although it is generally acknowledged that the interactive nature of DRAs brings a number of pressures on regulatory governance, the theoretical implications of the interactive nature of DRAs remain unexplored. To move this issue forward, this paper claims that DRAs have a global-domestic institutional dimension and that a new perspective of political legitimacy is needed. In the first place, this paper elaborates an institutional characterization of the global-domestic institutional dimension. It shows that DRAs interact globally, performing mainly four roles: (i) DRAs can produce domestic decisions with global impacts, (ii) they can be recipients of non-binding non-state decisions, (iii) DRAs can participate in the creation of non-state standards and (iv) implement binding non-state decisions. Based on this characterization, this paper claims that DRAs global-domestic dimension brings about changes in the way they exercise their political power, so it is worth asking how we should assess DRAs political legitimacy. Thus, normatively, based partially on network theory, the second part of this paper proposes a rethinking of the dominant method used in the literature to evaluate the political legitimacy of political actors that interact globally. It argues that a networked perspective of political legitimacy makes three main contributions to setting a standard of legitimacy for DRAs: it shows the need to establish a complex standard of legitimacy (methodological contribution), it provides guidelines on how to interpret the criteria of legitimacy (methodological-normative contribution), and it allows us to embrace the democratic ideal of political legitimacy (normative contribution). This paper concludes that a networked perspective of political legitimacy is normatively sound in grasping and assessing the domestic-global authority of DRAs.