Tarrant, A.D.; (2011) Why does European Union Legislation sometimes empower national regulatory authorities and sometimes empower European Agencies to undertake regulation for the single market? Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis investigates why EU single market legislation sometimes privileges national regulatory authorities ("NRAs") as the authoritative decision-makers while other legislation in the same field privileges EU regulatory Agencies. Most of the literature on both EU regulatory Agencies and independent NRAs has explained their creation in functional terms. While there may be functional benefits to be gained from creating regulatory bodies in EU legislation, the thesis argues that their design is not necessarily determined by the standard functional imperatives – indeed, sometimes such delegates, at least from the perspective of actually meeting functions such as credible commitment, may be designed by principals to be ineffective. The theory advanced in the thesis is that Member States will prefer NRAs to be the bodies controlling implementation in those cases where there is distributional conflict and Agencies and/or the Commission where there is not. The Commission and the European Parliament will usually advocate supranational regulatory institutions but will be unable to overcome collective Council preferences where they are in favour of NRAs. The empirical findings in the thesis with respect to the acts of delegation suggest these hypotheses are correct. In addition, the thesis hypothesises that regulatory outcomes will be consistent with the type of design adopted. Consequently, an examination of regulatory implementation is also undertaken in order to verify whether this is the case. The thesis finds that implementation outcomes also vary depending on the type of institution selected.

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