Abstract
This article analyses the institutional entrepreneurship within independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) as a variable explaining policy change over time and seeks to offer new insight for the identification and analysis of structure-agency relationships. The article contributes to the institutional entrepreneurship research agenda by connecting changes in IRA consumer protection policy to changes in agency leadership (specifically, agency presidents). The method used relies upon a quantitative and qualitative text analysis approach to connect and pinpoint structure-agency dynamics over time. The empirical sections compare and contrast the results obtained through the content analysis of the annual reports issued between 2000 and 2015 by the Italian Communications Authority (Agcom), and illustrate variations between periodic changes to Agcom’s presidency and changes in ideas, strategies and tools in the field of consumer protection in the telecommunications sector.
Highlights
In Europe, the rise and diffusion of Independent Regulatory Agencies (IRAs) have modified the policy game in many policy sectors (Jordana, Levi-Faur, & Fernàndez, 2011)
The rhetorical approach has a long tradition in analysing sounds, strategies and personal leadership techniques (Conger, 1991; Conger & Kanungo, 1998; Fiol, Harris, & House, 1999; Hart, 1987; Lasswell, 1948; Lowi, 1985), but has had only limited application among independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) scholars, essentially due to the instrumental role assigned by the Regulatory State (RS) theory to these agents in favour of more political principals (Majone, 1994)
How, can we ascertain and operationalize change that occurs over time in agency-structure relationships regarding consumer and user protection at the state level? The degree of institutional and policy entrepreneurship is operationalized here through the salience and attention given to the consumer protection issue empirically assessable by analysing the words appearing most frequently in IRA public discourses under different presidencies, a technique that allows us to at least partially resolve the problem of potential bias in policy historical process tracing and that of identifying the complex variability of idea-related content over time
Summary
In Europe, the rise and diffusion of Independent Regulatory Agencies (IRAs) have modified the policy game in many policy sectors (Jordana, Levi-Faur, & Fernàndez, 2011). The ‘rhetorical approach’, on the other hand, elects to focus on individual actors (IRA top figures) and analyse their public discourses as soft regulation tools (Lim, 2002; Olson, 2007; Seyranian & Bligh, 2008; Tabellini, 1987). Public discourses, both oral and written, are used as empirical evidence to identify and to track the actor engagement in changing structures and policy outcomes over time (Bligh & Hess, 2007). We seek to look at the institutional entrepreneurship to operationalize agency in the structure-agency debate with special reference to policy change in IRAs (Bakir & Jarvis, 2018; Campbell, 2002; Schmidt, 2010, 2011; Schumpeter, 1942)
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