The promise of bureaucratic reputation approaches for the EU regulatory state

Reputation literature has provided crucial insights about the evolution of the US regulatory state. Daniel Carpenter’s influential account painstakingly demonstrates the relevance of reputation to bureaucratic ‘power’ and to early institutional state-building in the US context. We argue that adopting a reputational lens provides important insights for the EU regulatory state, the evolution of its regulatory agents, and their efforts at legitimation. This contribution proposes a novel research agenda by applying core bureaucratic reputation concepts and arguments to the scholarship on the EU regulatory state and its core actors to explore the following questions: To what extent does the theory ‘travel well’ in an EU context? Does it have purchase power, and what can it contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the EU regulatory state and the behaviour and legitimacy of supranational regulators?.