“The National Politics of European Regulation: Institutional Reform in Telecommunications”

The article begins by briefly setting out the national institutional structures that existed before the mid-1980s in telecommunications and the main pressures for change, before looking at the key features and requirements of EC regulation most relevant to institutional reform (sections I and II); the purpose is not to explain the development of national institutional arrangements or EC regulation, but to set them out in order to allow analysis of the impact of the latter on the former. The paper then compares alteration of two key institutional arrangements: competition; organisational structures, including ownership and regulatory bodies and power (sections III and IV). The concluding section seeks to link the findings to more general arguments about the impacts of EC regulation and the factors that influence those impacts