Policy & Politics Journal Blog

by Libby Maman, Jacint Jordana, David Levi-Faur, Edoardo Guaschino, Rahel Schomaker, and Esther Van-Zimmeren

Building on her previous research published here in Policy & Politics, Libby Maman, with coauthors Jacint Jordana, David Levi-Faur, Edoardo Guaschino, Rahel Schomaker and Esther Van-Zimmeren offer the first validated, comparative tool for analysing how regulatory agencies balance transparency, accountability, participation and inclusiveness — both in law (de jure) and in practice (de facto).

The expansion of independent regulatory agencies in recent decades has raised enduring questions about their democratic legitimacy. Technocratic in design and often insulated from representative politics, these bodies are seen to lack clear lines of democratic accountability. In response, scholars have argued that four democratic qualities — transparency, accountability, participation and inclusiveness — are central to enhancing the legitimacy of regulatory governance. Yet despite their importance, these qualities have rarely been measured together or validated against real-world data.

This article fills that gap by developing and empirically testing 66 indicators of these democratic qualities across 49 regulatory bodies in nine countries and three sectors: food safety, data protection, and finance. The result is a validated, multidimensional dataset that supports systematic comparison across countries, sectors and institutional contexts.

One of the article’s main contributions lies in demonstrating that transparency, accountability, participation and inclusiveness are empirically distinct. While democratic theory often assumes these qualities are mutually reinforcing, the authors find only weak correlations between them — suggesting that regulatory bodies may adopt each quality to varying degrees and for different reasons. Moreover, de jure and de facto scores often diverge significantly, indicating that formal rules may not reflect everyday organisational practice.

These findings challenge the idea that democratic legitimacy in regulatory governance can be inferred from institutional design alone. They also open new avenues for theory development: future research can now investigate why certain agencies emphasise some democratic qualities over others, and how sectoral dynamics, legal frameworks or internal cultures shape these decisions.

By creating a reliable tool to measure democratic qualities in regulatory governance, this article provides an essential empirical foundation for a field that has long relied on fragmented or one-dimensional indicators. It equips scholars to examine not just how democratic regulatory bodies appear on paper, but how they operate in practice — and what that means for democratic legitimacy in the regulatory state.

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You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at

Maman, L., Jordana, J., Levi-Faur, D., Guaschino, E., Schomaker, R., and Van-Zimmeren, E. (2025). A new measurement model and database of the democratic qualities of regulatory bodies. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2025), available from: < https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2025D000000074>

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