Agency Independence and Partisan Influence in the Regulatory State

There is a natural tension between theories of party government and theories of regulatory politics. Whereas effective party government requires that politicians have firm control over public policy, the need for credible commitment in regulation stipulates that policy-making capacities are delegated to independent agencies. While the theoretical dimension of this tension is well-established, there is little research that examines its empirical implications. To narrow this gap the analysis assesses whether agency independence limits the influence of parties on agency executives. To that end it investigates the careers of 300 CEOs in 100 West European regulatory agencies. The analysis shows that high levels of agency independence protect appointees with opposition ties from early removal. This presents some of the first evidence to suggest that the institutional response to credibility pressures limits the political use of the appointment channel and thus has the potential to constrain party control in regulatory politics. This research was conducted within the project ‘Party Government, Patronage, and the Regulatory State’ (grant no. J 3409-G11), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). An earlier verison of this paper was presented at the workshop ‘Clientelism and the Quality of Public Policy’ at the ECPR Joint Sessions 2014, University of Salamanca, Spain, April 10-15.