Assessing the Democratic Deficit of Regulatory Authorities: A Cross-country and Cross-sector Comparative Perspective

Previous scholarship has been concerned about regulatory authorities’ weak democratic and legitimacy deficits. At the same time, scholars identified increasing democratic qualities, such as participation and inclusiveness, that confer power to external actors. This paper tests these arguments utilizing a novel comprehensive database on the democratic qualities of regulatory authorities covering 47 regulatory agencies in nine European countries over three different regulatory sectors: data protection, food safety and the financial sector. This database offers a unique opportunity to assess institutional designs in a systematic and quantitative way. In the paper we describe the indicators utilized to measure the legal obligations and the actual performance of four democratic qualities: transparency, participation, accountability and inclusiveness and two additional control variables: political independence and managerial autonomy. We then explore variations between agencies to investigate whether higher levels of political independence and managerial autonomy are correlated with more democratic qualities. In addition, we utilize the data to identify formal/informal institutional decoupling.