Research Papers

Depolitization is a core element of the EU’s approach towards realizing its liberalization agenda: important regulatory powers have been delegated to non-majoritarian institutions, which alongside private actors play a crucial role in implementing market opening policies. In terms of institutional design and regulatory reform, the independence from the political arena of newly introduced sector regulators has been a key requirement which often triggered legal disputes over insufficient compliance. The legitimacy effects of this strategy are being questioned referring to both the input and output dimension: Does depoliticization help or hamper participation in and control of regulatory policy-making? Is depoliticization a guarantee for effective implementation and compliance with policy objectives? Conceptually the paper builds on key debates about legitimacy in the regulatory governance literature, drawing in particular on Adriaan Schout’s work. The empirical focus is on multi-level governance arrangements in the European electricity and postal sectors. These are two politically sensitive cases which have been on the European reform agenda since the mid-1990s. Both sectors have gone through three difficult rounds of supranational policy-formulation, both have been fully opened to competition, and both have experienced substantial institutional reshuffling which empowered non-majoritarian and private actors. In terms of substantial reform outcomes, however, change appears to be rather limited since competition and market integration are slow to emerge. In this context the paper examines to what extent depolitization is an explanatory factor for these outcomes, and whether a lack of input legitimacy has potentially translated into a lack of output legitimacy.