A key claim in bureaucratic reputation literature is that reputation has several dimensions. This presents agencies with a difficult choice concerning which dimension(s) they should emphasize in the management of their reputation. This paper analyzes how regulatory agencies manage their reputation through communicative responses to public judgments, based on a single‐case study of the German financial regulator BaFin. Our theoretical argument underscores the importance of different reputational dimensions for regulatory agencies that simultaneously considers their distinct reputation reserves. Our main finding was that BaFin prioritizes responses to public judgments targeting reputational dimensions that are central to its mission and for which the agency has a weak reputation, as opposed to judgments targeting dimensions that are central to its mission and for which it has a strong reputation, or judgments targeting peripheral dimensions. The paper demonstrates the importance of agency missions for reputation management and suggests directions for further research.

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In a crisis, fast reaction is key. But what can public administration tell us about this? This study develops a theoretical framework explaining how administrative characteristics, including fragmentation, capacities, legacies and learning, affect governments' response timing. The COVID‐19 pandemic is exploited as a unique empirical setting to test this framework and its scope conditions. Region fixed‐effects models and survival analysis of partly hand collected data for more than 150 national governments confirm some limited predictive power of administrative structures and traditions: Especially in developing countries, governments with a separate ministry of health adopted binding containment measures faster. Countries with hierarchical administrative traditions, for example, socialist, adopted some interventions like school closures faster than more liberal traditions, for example, Anglo‐American. These characteristics increase threat perception and availability of a response, respectively. Results also suggest that intracrisis and intercrisis learning supply governments with response options. The study advances comparative public administration and crisis research.

This chapter studies decision-making behaviour of independent regulatory agencies. Theoretical accounts of delegation to regulatory agencies emphasize that losses of political accountability of regulators are traded off against potential gains in regulatory efficiency. The theory of credible commitment suggests that independent (non-majoritarian) regulatory agencies are more effective in regulating markets than organizations under direct political control. However, independent regulatory agencies operate in a political context and need to demonstrate their benefit to a diverse set of stakeholders, including elected politicians. We are hence confronted with a 'paradox of autonomization' according to which more autonomous public organizations have to take into consideration external demands to a greater degree than less autonomous organizations. Independent regulatory agencies will thus be subjected to high accountability demands. We use the analytical lens of bureaucratic reputation theory to analyse how different types of external demands affect regulatory agencies' attention to stakeholders. The chapter argues that reputation sensitive regulatory agencies will exhibit differential response patterns to negative public judgments, depending on the kind of negative judgments and the type of actor criticizing the regulator. We use systematic media analysis of public judgements and regulators' communicative response, using the financial regulator and the utility regulator (electricity, railways etc.) in Germany as empirical cases. We find that regulatory agencies respond differently to negative public judgments, yet are not more (or less) responsive to political actors' criticism compared to other types of actors. This finding questions independent regulatory agencies' democratic accountability, yet the chapter also suggests that public criticism and debate is only one channel among many others through which regulators are held democratically accountable.

Regulation plays a central role in modern governance; yet, we have limited knowledge of how subjects of regulation—particularly, private actors—act in the face of potentially adverse regulatory decisions. Here, we document and examine a novel lobbying strategy in the context of competition regulation, a strategy that exploits the regulator’s finite administrative capacities. Companies with merger cases under scrutiny by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition appear to be employing a strategy of ‘spamming the regulator,’ through the strategic and cumulative submission of economic expert assessments. Procedural pressures may result in an undeservedly favourable assessment of the merger. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of an original dataset of all complex merger cases in the European Union 2005–2020, we present evidence of this new strategy and a possible learning process among private actors. We suggest remedies to ensure regulatory effectiveness in the face of this novel strategy.