H:\budapest\ECPRbudapest.doc

There is a missing link between studies, which investigate how regulation is becoming more similar on one hand, and studies which focus on how national policy styles and administrative traditions create patterns of stable diversity on the other. The article attempts to bridge these views in an analysis of how ideas transform as they transfer. The article shows, that the idea of creating independent regulatory authorities (IRAs) has become institutionalised as a script regarding how the regulation of liberalised electricity markets ought to be organised. This script has transferred to the EU-15 in processes moving from mimetic and normative to more coercive isomorphism, but the transformation is influenced by the way the need for credibility is mediated by contextual factors. Thus IRAs have more formal independence in countries formerly dominated by state ownership, where policy-makers are perceived as corrupt and where decentralisation is low. In this way, the analysis reveals, how impulses of institutional change from the international arena are mediated by more stable and robust institutional factors at the domestic level. 1 1