The autonomous regulatory agency has recently become the ‘appropriate model' of governance across countries and sectors. The dynamics of this process is captured in our data set, which covers the creation of agencies in 48 countries and 16 sectors since the 1920s. Adopting a diffusion approach...

The paper introduces a dataset of de jure institutional characteristics of regulatory agencies in more than 100 countries and 16 sectors. By doing so it discusses up to which degree countries with different administrative traditions have shaped the incorporation of such institutions into their...