Organizational‐reputation literature has advanced our understanding about the U.S. regulatory state and its agencies. However, we lack contributions on what a reputational account can add to our knowledge about the European regulatory state, the strategic behavior of supranational agencies, and their endeavors to legitimize themselves in a multilevel political system. We know little of how reputation‐management strategies vary across EU agencies and why. The study offers the very first mapping of organizational‐reputation‐management patterns across all EU agencies, as well as the first empirical assessment on how reputational considerations guide supranational agencies' legitimation strategies. The results indicate that EU agencies facing higher reputational threats revert to their avowed raison d'être (i.e., technical conduct). We find that regulatory agencies utilize a more diverse set of reputational strategies by emphasizing the technical, procedural, and moral reputations more than nonregulatory agencies, whereas social‐policy agencies foster their technical reputation more than economic‐policy agencies.

European Union agencies are crucial institutional agents of the EU regulatory state. As such, they are faced with multiple expectations from a broad array of audiences. Reputation literature teaches us that the process of how organisations manage the expectations of their multifaceted audiences is central to organisational reputation. However, there has been little research about the diverse aspects of organisational reputation that EU agencies communicate to legitimise their existence. And how does this vary over time, across agencies, and why? More broadly, the study reflects on the implications of these attempts at self-presentation for the regulatory state's legitimising credentials. It introduces a novel measurement of reputational dimensions and draws on a quantitative analysis of all EU regulatory agencies' annual reports across time. Our findings indicate that agencies are becoming more reputationally-astute over time, expanding their reputational repertoire. However, this expansion is consistent with the tenants of the EU regulatory state.

This article aims to explain the variation in the scientific risk assessments conducted by two regulatory agencies: the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES). To explain the merits of scientific risk assessments that have caused polarization within the EU, this article draws on bureaucratic reputation theory. The theory argues that regulators are political organizations that are active in protecting their unique organizational reputations. The findings obtained from interviews, direct observations, and primary documents yield support for this framework: depending on reputational threats, agencies choose to emphasize either their role as guardians of the prevailing social values, or send strong professional signals by delivering a scientifically rigorous risk assessment.

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?

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