The Political Communication of Independent Regulatory Agencies*

Abstract: Since independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) became key actors in European regula-tory governance in the 1990s, a significant share of policy-making has been carried out by organi-zations that are neither democratically elected nor directly accountable to elected politicians. In this context, public communication plays an important role. On the one hand, regulatory agencies might try to use communication to raise their accountability and thereby to mitigate their demo-cratic deficit. On the other hand, communication may be used with the intent to steer the behavior of the regulated industry when more coercive regulatory means are unfeasible or undesirable. How-ever, empirical research focusing directly on how regulators communicate is virtually non-existent. To fill this gap, this paper examines the public communication of IRAs in four countries (the Uni