Abstract
This article tests two competing hypotheses in the study of the institutional design of regulatory agencies. Political explanations consider the degree of institutional design of regulatory agencies as a function of political factors, such as the degree of policy conflict and political uncertainty. By contrast, historical-cultural explanations of institutional design claim that the design of regulatory agencies is a function of path dependency and national administrative traditions. In this article, we test these hypotheses on a data set of 293 regulatory agencies that were created between 1945 and 2000 in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. We find strong support for historical-cultural explanations, while our findings suggest that political factors play almost no role in the institutional design of regulatory agencies within parliamentary regimes.
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