Exploring the Ideological Foundations of the Regulatory State
The literature on the regulatory state is either agnostic or inconclusive about the role of ideology as a determinant of delegation to independent regulatory agencies. This paper puts forward a new theoretical argument, claiming that the impact of government ideology is conditional on policy areas. Drawing on a data set of 110 agency creations across seven policy domains in 20 countries between 1980 and 2009, the analysis shows that government ideology has a substantial impact on the establishment of regulators, with right-wing governments more likely to set up economic regulators and left-wing governments more likely to establish social regulators. This finding fills an important gap in the literature on the regulatory state and asserts the significance of political explanations in studying the transformation of the public sector.