Jacint Jordana
Biographic Data
| ID | 1361254 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jacint Jordana |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jacint |
| FAMILY NAME | Jordana |
| SIGNATURE | JORDANA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universitat Pompeu Fabra |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2700-6747 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 520 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Strengthening Trust by Design: A QCA Study of Design Choices in Regulatory Regimes
How can the design of regulatory regimes foster trust in those regimes? In food safety, finance, and data protection regulation, regulatory frameworks have been reformed to restore trust after regulatory failures. Using fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis, this paper seeks to identify how key design choices—centralization of competencies in one versus multiple regulatory agencies, agency independence, mandated interactions, and rules perce…
Turning Vulnerability Into Strength: How Independent Regulatory Agencies Enhance Accountability and Build Stakeholder Trust
Trustable environments are highly appreciated for regulatory performance, but difficult to emerge. A condition for making trust work is to accept vulnerability, and this holds both for stakeholders and agencies in public governance. Trust‐related vulnerability can be understood as a dynamic perception of potential harm derived from entering into a desired interaction. While stakeholders increased vulnerability due to voluntary exchanges with publ…
Consumer Authorities in Europe: Policing Markets or Empowering Consumers
Consumer protection authorities are vital for domestic markets and the smooth functioning of the EU common market. Established several decades ago, these authorities have different institutional designs in different European countries. This paper aims to identify them and assess their main variations. Based on the literature at the intersection of consumer protection regimes and regulatory governance, we propose a theoretical distinction between …
A new measurement model and database of the democratic qualities of regulatory bodies
Transparency, accountability, participation and inclusiveness are central concepts in the literature on public administration. They are considered qualities that enable administrative bodies to share power with social and political actors and strengthen their democratic nature. These qualities have also been recognized as crucial for regulatory bodies, especially because of the technocratic nature of these bodies. Despite their importance, the li…
Multi-level governance in higher education quality assurance: Agencification and policy coordination in Spain
This article aims to examine the emergence of a system of multi-level governance in Higher Education quality assurance during recent decades in Spain, as a particular case within the European Space of Higher Education. Although there is a well-established multi-level structure in the governance of this area at the European level, it is not very common to find countries having an internal multi-level configuration. Most countries have allocated qu…
The future(s) of global governance: A scenarios exercise
Pervasive uncertainty has stretched the fabric of global governance to its limit. The shape and form of future global governance is far from clear – yet we need to explore how it may play out, so that we can not only prepare for it but also overcome possible pernicious trajectories. Scenario thinking can be used to rigorously explore different possible outcomes. In this article, we present an exercise applying scenario thinking to global governan…
Institutional Transformations of Global Governance – Key Challenges for International Organisations
This article examines the evolving institutional challenges of global governance by analyzing four key sectors: trade, security, environment, and finance. Recent transformations have increased their complexity and fragmentation in these sectors, challenging the traditional dominance of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Based on the findings of the H2020 GLOBE project and a survey of 1,004 IGO staff, we discuss four major cross-sectoral chal…
Managing expectations in financial markets: Voluntary accountability practices of capital market regulators in Spain and Turkey
In recent decades, independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) have been introduced as part of public administration reforms around the world. Unlike traditional administrative agencies, most IRAs are not accountable to the executive and their accountability relationship to the legislative tends to be weak. Nevertheless, these agencies often engage in acts of voluntary explanation and justification of their decisions to stakeholders. Based on a compar…
Responding to the need of postgraduate education for Planetary Health: Development of an online Master's Degree
Planetary Health has emerged as a new approach to respond to the existential risks that the clime and global environmental crises pose to human societies. As stated by various stakeholders, the challenges involved in Planetary Health are of such magnitude that education must be at the forefront to obtain a meaningful response. Universities and higher education institutions have been specifically called to embed the concept of planetary stewardshi…
The oil factor: Regulatory agency creation in the Mena region
The regulatory governance literature has shown a rising interest in the development of the regulatory agencies in developing countries. We now have a relatively good number of studies on Latin America and Asia. However, there is, to date, very scarce knowledge about regulatory governance in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA countries), where regulatory agencies diffused less systematically and more slowly. This paper makes a first step to…
Global Governance Research: Exploring Patterns of Growth, Diversity, and Inclusion
Global governance has been widely embraced as an object of analysis and as a way of “seeing” world politics. Yet we still know little about how publishing has evolved. This article presents the first systematic exploration of these patterns. It uses an original dataset of global governance research to answer three first-order questions: How has publishing varied over time? What issues have scholars focused on? And who has been publishing in the f…
Trans-governmental regulatory networks and the European Union’s involvement in global governance: An occasional instrument
The European Union (EU) has actively promoted the establishment of national regulatory agencies (NRAs) in its member states since the 1990s. In parallel, the EU has supported the establishment of trans-governmental regulatory networks (TRNs) to facilitate the harmonization of regulatory frameworks within the EU. In most cases, these TRNs had a very light organization but allowed an intense interaction and collaboration among officials from the di…
Entangled agencies and embedded preferences: National Regulatory Agencies in multi-level European governance
The emergence of trans-governmental policy regimes in Europe has fundamentally changed the role of National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs). Here we move away from the idea that there is a meaningful divide between the domestic and the European levels of governance and suggest that a different logic has emerged in recent decades, combining multiple chains of delegation and innovative coordination schemes. NRAs have come to occupy a ‘broker’ or interme…
The politics of unilateral secession in the European Union: The case of Catalonia
We analyse the politics of unilateral secession in the European Union (EU), focusing on the Catalan secessionist conflict. Building on a triangulation strategy, within which primary data are cross-checked through semi-structured expert interviews, we examine how the involved central state and secessionist sub-state actor fought for the support of the supranational party within the EU’s multilevel framework. We make two entrenched contributions. W…
Introduction: Regulatory Governance of Higher Education in Latin America
This special section emerged in the framework of a research project on the regulation governance of higher education supported by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, Spain [grant number CSO2015-68682-P
Varying Power Configurations and the Accountability of Independent Regulatory Agencies
Independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) have a significant capability to choose how to implement their decisions to be effective, given the mix of managerial autonomy, supervisory powers and political independence that most of these agencies enjoy. As such, traditional approaches which focus on their institutional characteristics or their reputational problems do not fully capture the variation in IRAs’ behavior. This paper suggests a complementar…
Drivers of integration? EU agency board members on transboundary crises
EU agencies' involvement in transboundary crisis response: Supporting efforts or leading coordination
EU agencies have emerged as entities offering technical coordination to member states and support to the European Commission in different policy areas. Their expertise may play a role in responding to unexpected crises. Against this backdrop, we examine under which circumstances EU agencies, through their specialized expertise, are involved in transboundary crisis responses, and when they acquire a leading position in coordinating those responses…
European Union Agencies: A global governance perspective
European Union agencies have been studied explicitly or implicitly from two distinct perspectives: an intergovernmental or a supranational point of view. Both relate to broader dynamics and aim to understand the forces that EU agencies respond to. However, different authors have pointed out that both perspectives can be observed simultaneously in EU agencies. This is because they combine intergovernmental coordination and access to supranational …
Agency proliferation and the globalization of the regulatory state: Introducing a data set on the institutional features of regulatory agencies
State structures have experienced significant transformation with the spread of globalization. This paper examines how to measure one major change that has occurred in recent decades: the worldwide proliferation of public agencies with regulatory tasks. It remains unclear how their configurations vary across countries and sectors, and what can be learned from these variations. To better identify these agencies worldwide, we introduce a new datase…
International Networks as Drivers of Agency Independence: The Case of the Spanish Nuclear Safety Council
This article discusses how the extension of network governance influences the de facto independence of regulatory agencies. Assuming that agencies gain de facto independence vis-à-vis the government when they experience a substantive increase in their reputation, we argue that agency participation in international governance networks contributes to strengthened agency domestic positions due to organizational learning and the expansion of expert k…
Austerity or welfare state transformation? Examining the impact of economic crises on social regulation in Europe
This article provides an encompassing analysis of how economic crises affect social regulation. The analysis is based on an innovative dataset that covers policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013) in the areas of pensions, unemployment, and child benefits. By performing a negative binomial regression analysis, we show that economic crises do matter for social policymaking. Our main empirical finding is t…
Administrative Innovations and Accountability Failures: The Termination of the Spanish Telecommunications Agency
We discuss how far accountability practices may be relevant to the success of independent regulators in countries without a tradition of administrative autonomy. We develop a conceptualisation of agency accountability failures and develop an analytical framework to examine the life and termination of the Spanish regulatory agency for telecommunications, CMT (Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones - Telecommunications Market Commission). W…
Las agencias públicas en España: Tensiones Entre Autonomía Y Rendición De Cuentas
El objetivo de este artículo es contribuir al análisis de la autonomía, control y gestión de las agencias públicas en España, a partir de las percepciones de sus responsables sobre su capacidad financiera y operativa, así como sobre sus mecanismos de rendición de cuentas. Para ello, este trabajo se basa en las opiniones de los altos cargos de las agencias, recogidas a través de una encuesta realizada entre julio y noviembre de 2013. La encuesta s…
Transgovernmental Networks as Regulatory Intermediaries: Horizontal Collaboration and the Realities of Soft Power
This article explores and elucidates the activities of transnational networks as regulatory intermediaries. Specifically, I examine their role in the regulation of banks, as far as they facilitate exchanges between global regulators (GRs)-such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision or the Financial Stability Board-and local regulators (LRs), such as national regulatory agencies or legislatures. I find that transgovernmental network interme…
The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies: Channels of Transfer and Stages of Diffusion
The autonomous regulatory agency has recently become the “appropriate model” of governance across countries and sectors. The dynamics of this process are captured in the authors’ data set, which covers the establishment of agencies in 48 countries and 15 sectors for the period 1966-2007. Adopting a diffusion approach to explain this broad process of institutional change, the authors explore the role of countries and sectors as sources of institut…
The Diffusion of Regulatory Capitalism in Latin America: Sectoral and National Channels in the Making of a New Order
This article analyzes the sweeping restructuring of the state in Latin America and the consequent institutionalization of a new regulatory order. The analysis is grounded in an original database that covers the creation of regulatory agencies and their reform in nineteen countries and twelve sectors over the period from 1979 to 2002. The authors’ data capture both the national and the sectoral patterns of the rise of the new order, and the author…
Agency proliferation and the globalization of the regulatory state: Introducing a data set on the institutional features of regulatory agencies
State structures have experienced significant transformation with the spread of globalization. This paper examines how to measure one major change that has occurred in recent decades: the worldwide proliferation of public agencies with regulatory tasks. It remains unclear how their configurations vary across countries and sectors, and what can be learned from these variations. To better identify these agencies worldwide, we introduce a new datase…
The Rise of Regulatory Capitalism: The Global Diffusion of a New Order
Preface - David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana Introduction: 'The Making of a New Regulatory Order - David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana PART I. Globalization as a Diffusion Process: Theoretical Framework The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Capitalism - David Levi-Faur On Wave Clusters and Diffusion: A Conceptual Framework - Elkins Zachary and Beth Simmons Regulatory Capitalism as a Networked Order: The International System as an Informational Networ…
Globalizing Regulatory Capitalism
This institutional web facilitates ad hoc coopera tion, making economic interactions easier and reinforcing actors' positive expectations of future interactions. Historically, capitalism emerged more strongly in areas where it was facilitated by strong institutions and positive forms of collective action. Where such institu tions and other social resources were absent, national capitalist markets lagged behind (Fligstein 2001). By translating thi…
The Limits of Europeanization: Regulatory Reforms in the Spanish and Portuguese Telecommunications and Electricity Sectors
The creation of a European Union‐level regulatory regime for telecommunications and electricity was a highly successful political initiative of the European Commission. However, this article argues that the causal link between European initiatives and national policy change is weak. Building on an emerging tradition of cross‐sector research of these two sectors, and considering two most similar European countries, the article applies a series of …
Are regulatory agencies independent in practice? Evidence from board members in Spain
Are the board members of regulatory agencies (regulators), taken as a particular cluster within the public sphere, independent of elected politicians and tenured bureaucrats? How can we assess their independence in practice, beyond formal rules? To address these questions, this paper delves into two key dimensions: board members' social connections and their security of tenure in office. Firstly, we focus on regulators' identity as policy adjudic…
Austerity or welfare state transformation? Examining the impact of economic crises on social regulation in Europe
This article provides an encompassing analysis of how economic crises affect social regulation. The analysis is based on an innovative dataset that covers policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013) in the areas of pensions, unemployment, and child benefits. By performing a negative binomial regression analysis, we show that economic crises do matter for social policymaking. Our main empirical finding is t…
Delegation, Presidential Regimes, and Latin American Regulatory Agencies
During the 1990s, a large number of regulatory agencies were created or reformed in different sectors in Latin American countries. Almost all included political delegation mechanisms, intended as formal rules to enhance credible commitments to time-consistent policies. In this paper, using an original data set of agencies’ head tenure in the telecommunications and finance regulatory agencies, we discuss if these mechanisms worked as planned, and …
Regulatory Capitalism: Policy Irritants and Convergent Divergence
The concluding part of this volume may be the right place to discuss the issue of the outcomes of regulatory capitalism. The analysis so far has only touched on the outcomes, and even here we cannot offer more than some suggestions on how to approach the issue. Not only is the new order still in the making, but its outcomes are unlikely to be straightforwardly positive or negative. The greater the change, the more difficult it is to control and c…
Transgovernmental Networks as Regulatory Intermediaries: Horizontal Collaboration and the Realities of Soft Power
This article explores and elucidates the activities of transnational networks as regulatory intermediaries. Specifically, I examine their role in the regulation of banks, as far as they facilitate exchanges between global regulators (GRs)-such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision or the Financial Stability Board-and local regulators (LRs), such as national regulatory agencies or legislatures. I find that transgovernmental network interme…
The emergence of regulatory regionalism: Transnational Networks and the Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies Within Regions
The regulatory regionalism approach has increasingly claimed that a new mode of regional governance is emerging globally. Regional policy regimes, developed in broad social and economic territorial areas, affect the internal transformation of the state. The authors plan to provide comprehensive empirical evidence about the emergence of worldwide regulatory regionalism by identifying how regulatory agencies have diffused very successfully within t…
Multiple Crises and Policy Dismantling in Spain: Political Strategies and Distributive Implications
This article examines the distributive implications of dismantling strategies applied to public policies in order to confront the multiple crises that have taken place in Spain since 2008. The hypotheses concern the logic of dismantling, while considering different theoretical alternatives. First, it is suspected that the configuration of social groups and business interests affects how dismantling strategies are chosen: the corporatist state sel…
Policy networks and market opening: Telecommunications liberalization in Spain
For a broad range of policy sectors, liberalization was the predominant goal during the 1990s, and the policy change involved gave rise to a wide range of academic debates. In this article we analyze the consequences of these far‐reaching policies for the policy process itself. We ask whether the policy changes significantly altered the characteristics of policy processes by considering the timing and extent of the changes in policy networks duri…
EU agencies' involvement in transboundary crisis response: Supporting efforts or leading coordination
EU agencies have emerged as entities offering technical coordination to member states and support to the European Commission in different policy areas. Their expertise may play a role in responding to unexpected crises. Against this backdrop, we examine under which circumstances EU agencies, through their specialized expertise, are involved in transboundary crisis responses, and when they acquire a leading position in coordinating those responses…
When do autonomous banking regulators promote stability
Can autonomous banking regulatory agencies reduce the odds that a country will suffer a crippling banking crisis? We investigate the impact that agencies charged with banking regulation and prudential supervision can have on financial stability in the banking sector. We argue that the potential benefits of autonomy are hard to realise because banking regulators face incentives to shirk in their mandate to secure banking stability. These incentive…
Entangled agencies and embedded preferences: National Regulatory Agencies in multi-level European governance
The emergence of trans-governmental policy regimes in Europe has fundamentally changed the role of National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs). Here we move away from the idea that there is a meaningful divide between the domestic and the European levels of governance and suggest that a different logic has emerged in recent decades, combining multiple chains of delegation and innovative coordination schemes. NRAs have come to occupy a ‘broker’ or interme…
International Networks as Drivers of Agency Independence: The Case of the Spanish Nuclear Safety Council
This article discusses how the extension of network governance influences the de facto independence of regulatory agencies. Assuming that agencies gain de facto independence vis-à-vis the government when they experience a substantive increase in their reputation, we argue that agency participation in international governance networks contributes to strengthened agency domestic positions due to organizational learning and the expansion of expert k…
Las agencias públicas en España: Tensiones Entre Autonomía Y Rendición De Cuentas
El objetivo de este artículo es contribuir al análisis de la autonomía, control y gestión de las agencias públicas en España, a partir de las percepciones de sus responsables sobre su capacidad financiera y operativa, así como sobre sus mecanismos de rendición de cuentas. Para ello, este trabajo se basa en las opiniones de los altos cargos de las agencias, recogidas a través de una encuesta realizada entre julio y noviembre de 2013. La encuesta s…
The oil factor: Regulatory agency creation in the Mena region
The regulatory governance literature has shown a rising interest in the development of the regulatory agencies in developing countries. We now have a relatively good number of studies on Latin America and Asia. However, there is, to date, very scarce knowledge about regulatory governance in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA countries), where regulatory agencies diffused less systematically and more slowly. This paper makes a first step to…
Trans-governmental regulatory networks and the European Union’s involvement in global governance: An occasional instrument
The European Union (EU) has actively promoted the establishment of national regulatory agencies (NRAs) in its member states since the 1990s. In parallel, the EU has supported the establishment of trans-governmental regulatory networks (TRNs) to facilitate the harmonization of regulatory frameworks within the EU. In most cases, these TRNs had a very light organization but allowed an intense interaction and collaboration among officials from the di…
Drivers of integration? EU agency board members on transboundary crises
Managing expectations in financial markets: Voluntary accountability practices of capital market regulators in Spain and Turkey
In recent decades, independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) have been introduced as part of public administration reforms around the world. Unlike traditional administrative agencies, most IRAs are not accountable to the executive and their accountability relationship to the legislative tends to be weak. Nevertheless, these agencies often engage in acts of voluntary explanation and justification of their decisions to stakeholders. Based on a compar…
Global Governance Research: Exploring Patterns of Growth, Diversity, and Inclusion
Global governance has been widely embraced as an object of analysis and as a way of “seeing” world politics. Yet we still know little about how publishing has evolved. This article presents the first systematic exploration of these patterns. It uses an original dataset of global governance research to answer three first-order questions: How has publishing varied over time? What issues have scholars focused on? And who has been publishing in the f…
The politics of unilateral secession in the European Union: The case of Catalonia
We analyse the politics of unilateral secession in the European Union (EU), focusing on the Catalan secessionist conflict. Building on a triangulation strategy, within which primary data are cross-checked through semi-structured expert interviews, we examine how the involved central state and secessionist sub-state actor fought for the support of the supranational party within the EU’s multilevel framework. We make two entrenched contributions. W…
La nova etapa de l'acció sindical a Espanya: Transformacions Laborals I Canvis Estratègics
La transici poltica espanyola s'ha anat: desenvolupant cap a la configuraci d'una democrhcia parlamenthria normalitzada, quan, per culpa dels seus inicis, es podia haver estancat en una o altra frmula de semidemocratitzaci. No obstant aixb, tant partits com sindicats han sofert freqentment crisis internes, i han mostrat una elevada inestabilitat en el seu desenvolupament. En termes generals, es pot afirmar que les organitzacions poltiques continu…
The Politics of Regulation: Institutions and Regulatory Reforms for the Age of Governance
This book suggests that the scope and breadth of regulatory reforms since the mid-1980s and particularly during the 1990s, are so striking that they necessitate a reappraisal of current approaches to the study of the politics of regulation. The authors call for the adoption of different and fresh perspectives to examine this area.
Which Internet Policy? Assessing Regional Initiatives in Spain
We examine the effect of public policy on the growth of Internet use. Using a decentralized country—Spain—as an example, we compare the 17 Spanish regions to test different Internet policy designs, taking into account the quality and number of specific programs promoted by regional governments, as well as the presence or absence of strategic planning in each region. We treat the percentage of Internet users as a dependent variable to compare its …
Globalizing Regulatory Capitalism
This institutional web facilitates ad hoc coopera tion, making economic interactions easier and reinforcing actors' positive expectations of future interactions. Historically, capitalism emerged more strongly in areas where it was facilitated by strong institutions and positive forms of collective action. Where such institu tions and other social resources were absent, national capitalist markets lagged behind (Fligstein 2001). By translating thi…
The Rise of Regulatory Capitalism: The Global Diffusion of a New Order
Preface - David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana Introduction: 'The Making of a New Regulatory Order - David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana PART I. Globalization as a Diffusion Process: Theoretical Framework The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Capitalism - David Levi-Faur On Wave Clusters and Diffusion: A Conceptual Framework - Elkins Zachary and Beth Simmons Regulatory Capitalism as a Networked Order: The International System as an Informational Networ…
The Diffusion of Regulatory Capitalism in Latin America: Sectoral and National Channels in the Making of a New Order
This article analyzes the sweeping restructuring of the state in Latin America and the consequent institutionalization of a new regulatory order. The analysis is grounded in an original database that covers the creation of regulatory agencies and their reform in nineteen countries and twelve sectors over the period from 1979 to 2002. The authors’ data capture both the national and the sectoral patterns of the rise of the new order, and the author…
Regulatory Capitalism: Policy Irritants and Convergent Divergence
The concluding part of this volume may be the right place to discuss the issue of the outcomes of regulatory capitalism. The analysis so far has only touched on the outcomes, and even here we cannot offer more than some suggestions on how to approach the issue. Not only is the new order still in the making, but its outcomes are unlikely to be straightforwardly positive or negative. The greater the change, the more difficult it is to control and c…
Policy networks and market opening: Telecommunications liberalization in Spain
For a broad range of policy sectors, liberalization was the predominant goal during the 1990s, and the policy change involved gave rise to a wide range of academic debates. In this article we analyze the consequences of these far‐reaching policies for the policy process itself. We ask whether the policy changes significantly altered the characteristics of policy processes by considering the timing and extent of the changes in policy networks duri…
The Limits of Europeanization: Regulatory Reforms in the Spanish and Portuguese Telecommunications and Electricity Sectors
The creation of a European Union‐level regulatory regime for telecommunications and electricity was a highly successful political initiative of the European Commission. However, this article argues that the causal link between European initiatives and national policy change is weak. Building on an emerging tradition of cross‐sector research of these two sectors, and considering two most similar European countries, the article applies a series of …
Producción y percepción de bienes públicos en la lógica de la acción colectiva
Bienes públicos con distintas propiedades generan problemas diferentes de acción colectiva. Esta hipótesis ha sido discutida, desde distintas perspectivas analíticas, con el objeto de profundizar teóricamente sobre la lógica de la acción colectiva. En este trabajo se revisan las aportaciones recientes a esta cuestión, analizando sus puntos de encuentro y sus divergencias en cuanto a conceptos y resultados esperados. Asimismo, se examina la relaci…
Delegation, Presidential Regimes, and Latin American Regulatory Agencies
During the 1990s, a large number of regulatory agencies were created or reformed in different sectors in Latin American countries. Almost all included political delegation mechanisms, intended as formal rules to enhance credible commitments to time-consistent policies. In this paper, using an original data set of agencies’ head tenure in the telecommunications and finance regulatory agencies, we discuss if these mechanisms worked as planned, and …
The Institutional Development of the Latin American Regulatory State
The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies: Channels of Transfer and Stages of Diffusion
The autonomous regulatory agency has recently become the “appropriate model” of governance across countries and sectors. The dynamics of this process are captured in the authors’ data set, which covers the establishment of agencies in 48 countries and 15 sectors for the period 1966-2007. Adopting a diffusion approach to explain this broad process of institutional change, the authors explore the role of countries and sectors as sources of institut…
From Dismantling by Default to Arena Shifting? Child Benefits Policy in Spain
This chapter analyses the dismantling of child benefits in Spain between 1975 and 1990. In comparison to Portugal, which has maintained its benefit policy over many years, it identifies some of the peculiarities of the Spanish case and discards traditional interpretations related to democratic transition. It focuses on the particular constellations of political costs and benefits in Spain. By looking at policy preferences, cost perceptions, oppor…
The role of social capital within policy networks: Evidence from EU cohesion policy in Spain
This article focuses on the policy process stemming from European cohesion policy at the regional level and at its programming stage (which precedes the implementation phase). It aims to explain how the formally introduced EU ‘partnership’ principles and rules work in practice in different political environments. The article argues that externally introduced procedural decision rules have different impacts on effective policymaking processes. In …
The unattainable politics of child benefits policy in Spain
Within the Southern European social model, Spain stands out because of the absence of a coherent child benefit policy. Spain not only constitutes a remarkable case of policy deactivation in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of a continuous series of instable decisions for more than three decades up until the present time. To account for the erratic child benefit policy in Spain since the country’s transition to democracy, this article goes beyond fun…
Multiple Crises and Policy Dismantling in Spain: Political Strategies and Distributive Implications
This article examines the distributive implications of dismantling strategies applied to public policies in order to confront the multiple crises that have taken place in Spain since 2008. The hypotheses concern the logic of dismantling, while considering different theoretical alternatives. First, it is suspected that the configuration of social groups and business interests affects how dismantling strategies are chosen: the corporatist state sel…
When do autonomous banking regulators promote stability
Can autonomous banking regulatory agencies reduce the odds that a country will suffer a crippling banking crisis? We investigate the impact that agencies charged with banking regulation and prudential supervision can have on financial stability in the banking sector. We argue that the potential benefits of autonomy are hard to realise because banking regulators face incentives to shirk in their mandate to secure banking stability. These incentive…
The emergence of regulatory regionalism: Transnational Networks and the Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies Within Regions
The regulatory regionalism approach has increasingly claimed that a new mode of regional governance is emerging globally. Regional policy regimes, developed in broad social and economic territorial areas, affect the internal transformation of the state. The authors plan to provide comprehensive empirical evidence about the emergence of worldwide regulatory regionalism by identifying how regulatory agencies have diffused very successfully within t…
Are regulatory agencies independent in practice? Evidence from board members in Spain
Are the board members of regulatory agencies (regulators), taken as a particular cluster within the public sphere, independent of elected politicians and tenured bureaucrats? How can we assess their independence in practice, beyond formal rules? To address these questions, this paper delves into two key dimensions: board members' social connections and their security of tenure in office. Firstly, we focus on regulators' identity as policy adjudic…
International Networks as Drivers of Agency Independence: The Case of the Spanish Nuclear Safety Council
This article discusses how the extension of network governance influences the de facto independence of regulatory agencies. Assuming that agencies gain de facto independence vis-à-vis the government when they experience a substantive increase in their reputation, we argue that agency participation in international governance networks contributes to strengthened agency domestic positions due to organizational learning and the expansion of expert k…
Austerity or welfare state transformation? Examining the impact of economic crises on social regulation in Europe
This article provides an encompassing analysis of how economic crises affect social regulation. The analysis is based on an innovative dataset that covers policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013) in the areas of pensions, unemployment, and child benefits. By performing a negative binomial regression analysis, we show that economic crises do matter for social policymaking. Our main empirical finding is t…
Administrative Innovations and Accountability Failures: The Termination of the Spanish Telecommunications Agency
We discuss how far accountability practices may be relevant to the success of independent regulators in countries without a tradition of administrative autonomy. We develop a conceptualisation of agency accountability failures and develop an analytical framework to examine the life and termination of the Spanish regulatory agency for telecommunications, CMT (Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones - Telecommunications Market Commission). W…
Las agencias públicas en España: Tensiones Entre Autonomía Y Rendición De Cuentas
El objetivo de este artículo es contribuir al análisis de la autonomía, control y gestión de las agencias públicas en España, a partir de las percepciones de sus responsables sobre su capacidad financiera y operativa, así como sobre sus mecanismos de rendición de cuentas. Para ello, este trabajo se basa en las opiniones de los altos cargos de las agencias, recogidas a través de una encuesta realizada entre julio y noviembre de 2013. La encuesta s…
Transgovernmental Networks as Regulatory Intermediaries: Horizontal Collaboration and the Realities of Soft Power
This article explores and elucidates the activities of transnational networks as regulatory intermediaries. Specifically, I examine their role in the regulation of banks, as far as they facilitate exchanges between global regulators (GRs)-such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision or the Financial Stability Board-and local regulators (LRs), such as national regulatory agencies or legislatures. I find that transgovernmental network interme…
Political science (41 works) · Economics (29 works) · Law (29 works) · Business (27 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (24 works) · Regulation and Compliance Studies (20 works) · Public Administration (16 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (15 works) · Public Administration (15 works)