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...

Regulation is typically conceived as a two-party relationship between a rule-maker or regulator (R) and a rule-taker or target (T). We set out an agenda for the study of regulation (and rules more broadly) as a three- (or more) party relationship – with intermediaries (I) at the center of the...