Do Rules Foster the Democratic Qualities of Regulatory Bodies? Conclusions from a Novel Dataset

In recent years, there has been a growing attention to organizational practices of regulatory bodies that are considered as democratic qualities, namely transparency, accountability, participation, and inclusiveness. However, there has not been much progress in terms of data collection that can allow to assess the extent to which regulatory bodies around the world include these qualities in practice, nor the extent to which they obliged to by law. This gap hampers researchers’ ability to assess the democratic quality of these bodies, compare them, and develop an empirical based theory on democratic regulatory governance. This paper aims to contribute to filling this gap by validating measures of both the formal and the actual (de-facto) democratic qualities of regulatory agencies. In addition, it discusses the differences between formal and de-facto qualities utilizing a novel database covering 49 regulatory bodies in eight countries and the EU level over three different regulatory sectors: data protection, food safety and the financial sector. In particular, this paper asks whether measuring de-facto transparency, accountability, participation, and inclusiveness of regulatory bodies yields a different image comparing to measuring the formal transparency, accountability, participation, and inclusiveness of regulatory bodies? In addition, it asks, in which ways do formal and de-facto dimensions couple and decouple with each other? This paper contributes to our understanding of the ability of legal data to serve as a tool to learn about social concepts such as democratic quality. Moreover, it contributes by validating measures of four central democratic qualities in the context of regulatory bodies which can serve the scholarship in asking questions about the role of regulatory governance in advancing democracy.