The adoption of digital practices by economic regulators: mapping digital pathways for consumer e-participation

This study bridges two emerging areas in the literature of economic regulation: the adoption of digital practices by national regulatory agencies (NRAs) and the empowerment of consumers for e-participation in regulatory processes through digitally enhanced consumer-facing platforms created by NRAs. With an aim to re-connect the regulatory state with citizens, we designed a novel framework, which comprehensively captures the digital capacity of NRAs and disentangles the multiple channels for consumer digital engagement with NRAs across the key regulatory procedures, including information provision, communication, education, and decision-making. To measure the extent of digitalisation of regulatory functions, we derived a composite index of digital adoption for 236 individual NRAs from a newly collected cross-sectional dataset, which spans across 42 geographically disperse EU and OECD countries with distinct regulatory and institutional pressures and public proactiveness in digitalisation. We analyse the cross country and cross-sectoral variation in the adoption of digital regulatory practices among the agencies with sole- and multi-sectoral competencies in five economic markets from utilities to financial services. Through modelling the impact of organisational-, industry-, and country level factors on the digital scores of NRAs, we address an overlooked question of whether the borderless nature of digital technologies allows to overcome the gap in adoption of consumer oriented regulatory practices. With these insights, this study offers implications for both improving the effectiveness of regulatory procedures through consumer-oriented digital transformation, as well as government initiatives for enhancing digital trust and e-participation in economic regulation among consumers.