Discreet Power through Reputation: Lessons from 20 years of empowerment of the European Centre for Disease Control

The power of non-majoritarian institutions depends on a credible reputation. This well-accepted claim has structured the debate on regulatory agencies for the last 30 years and is now seminal to the field of bureaucratic reputation. This paper pursues this ongoing scholarship and addresses how reputation relates to agency empowerment. The literature on reputation has focused on strategies adopted by regulators to sustain and develop their credibility but does not identify a precise mechanism for how reputation has an effect on how agencies are able to exercise power. This paper addresses this gap by answering the question: What is the role of reputation in explaining agency empowerment? The claim defended here is that reputation is a form of social knowledge informing agents throughout the process of empowerment: it informs the audiences, and the agency itself on the appropriateness of the role the agency should appropriately take on. Reputation alone does not empower but needs the intercession of knowledgeable agents, whereas audience members, the principal or the agency itself. This theoretical proposition is supported by evidence is drawn from the case of the empowerment of the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), an agency created with a very narrow legal remit. This paper contributes to the literature on reputation by showing that reputation may be instrumentalized beyond the theoretical priors advanced by the literature on reputation management.