Balancing reputational strategies in the European administrative space: how private actors and agencies talk about regulation

ABSTRACT

The reputational perspective on agencies has sparked fruitful research. We argue that this perspective can also be applied to private actors in regulatory governance. As they are incorporated into governance because of their expertise, we hypothesise that a technical reputation dominates private actors´ regulatory talk. Furthermore, we test whether agencies have a more multi-dimensional reputational strategy than private actors. We analyse documents of private actors, national regulatory agencies (NRAs) and a European agency (ACER) in energy market regulation. We code rule drafts and agency decisions, and show that private actors not only use technical, but also legal and performative arguments. However, NRAs and ACER have a more balanced reputational strategy. They balance the reputational mix of the private actors when approving rule drafts, adding to the reputational dimensions that private actors neglect. Thus, our article shows how private actors and agencies differ in their regulatory talk within one rulemaking process.

KEYWORDS:

• Reputation
• agencies
• energy policy
• regulation

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank three anonymous reviewers for contructive comments. Eva Ruffing, Luisa Maschlanka and Hermann Lüken genannt Klaßen for helpful comments on the first draft of this paper. Research for this article has been funded by the Norwegian Research Council, project Implementing Network Codes, funding reference 308855.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Competing interest

The author reports no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 See the Appendix for the titles of the TCMs to get an impression of the issues. The rules concern issues like “Proposal for list of standard balancing capacity products”, with further specification on the purpose and scope of these rules in the relevant guideline. The mandate of what the rules are supposed to do is narrowly defined, major issue shifts are unlikely.

2 See the Appendix for the list of TCMs covered.

3 See the Appendix for the dictionary.

4 A more general problem – that is, however, prevalent in many studies using reputation theory – is that we use coding of textual material to draw inferences about actor strategies, i.e. imply that actors purposefully use certain words to project a reputation. The logical next step to overcome this limitation would thus be interviews to elucidate how the actors approach the drafting process and what rationales they have when choosing the wording of their documents and amendments.

5 Regression models regressing the number of effective dimensions of the NRA or ACER approval document on the number of dimensions in the TSO final draft suggest that these differences are statistically significant for the NRA/TSO comparison. The ACER/TSO comparison does not reach conventional standards of statistical significance, but the number of observations is lower, see the Appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Norges Forskningsråd: [Grant Number 308855].

Notes on contributors

Simon Fink

Simon Fink is Professor for the Political System of Germany at the University of Goettingen, Germany.