Revisiting the regulatory state: Ministerial structures as the missing piece

For the past half-century, scholars of European economic governance have conceptualized the state through different lenses, including the regulatory state, the investor state, and more recently state capitalism. Yet across these debates, the analytical focus has been mostly on policies and less so on organizational features, with the notable exception of the extensive literature on regulatory agencies. This paper contends that the internal organization of ministries constitutes an equally but underexamined determinant of regulatory governance. Even as research highlights supranational constraints and the proliferation of regulatory agencies, the capacity to formulate, coordinate, and steer regulatory policy remains rooted in ministerial structures. The allocation of tasks across ministerial units, the layering of hierarchies, and the degree of functional specialization shape how information is gathered and interpreted, how trade-offs are adjudicated, and how political priorities are ultimately translated into regulatory instruments. By shifting the analytical lens to look inside the ministerial “black box,” we illuminate organizational dynamics that structure the regulatory state from within. We argue that these “structural choices” do not merely mirror administrative traditions but respond to changing pressures generated by market liberalization, risk regulation, and multilevel governance—particularly in the EU, where ministries act simultaneously as architects, coordinators, and implementers of regulatory regimes. Understanding the dynamics of ministerial design therefore provides crucial insights into why countries vary in their regulatory capacity, how they adjust to evolving regulatory demands, and why similar sectors produce divergent regulatory outcomes across Europe. Empirically, we leverage a novel dataset capturing the internal structure of ministries and agencies at the most granular level across four European countries: Germany and France as EU founders, the United Kingdom as a former member state, and Norway as an EEA member whose regulatory obligations remain closely tied to the EU. This dataset traces all organizational units and their formal responsibilities over time. We compare these structural configurations across core domains of economic regulation (energy, telecommunications, finance, competition) and juxtapose them with those found in societal or risk regulation (food safety, environmental protection, pharmaceuticals). In addition, we use EUR-Lex documentation of national transposition to identify responsible ministerial units. Two organizational lenses guide our analysis. The first concerns the origins and consequences of delegation to regulatory agencies: which ministerial units provided the organizational foundation for these agencies, and how did their removal reshape the structural profile of the ministries left behind? The second examines the “organizational residue” of EU regulatory activity within ministries, identifying how sustained interaction with EU rulemaking generates ministerial units and corresponding responsibilities that persist beyond any single directive. To apply the latter lens, we combine our structural dataset with existing datasets on EU regulatory compliance to classify national legal acts and identify responsible ministerial units over time. We expect to find similarities across countries—most prominently, that EU-linked regulatory demands strengthen specialized ministerial units—yet also systematic differences rooted in national administrative traditions and sector-specific trajectories. In sum, our findings advance an understanding of the regulatory governance that acknowledges the crucial role of ministerial structures.