Rules or Legacies? Industry and Political Revolving Doors in Regulators' Careers in Portugal

The movement of personnel between roles in regulation, politics, and regulated industries is thought to affect the risks of politicization and industry capture of independent regulatory agencies. To test whether such movements are better explained by formal rules or by sector-specific patterns, we employ an original dataset of the 152 appointees to eleven IRAs in Portugal over the last three decades. We find that variations in the formal independence of agencies have been of little consequence. Instead, revolving doors abound in the financial sector, with a disproportionate share of regulators of that sector coming from, and moving back, to the industry. In turn, appointment of regulators with political links to Portuguese IRAs seems related with legacies of sectoral public control.

人员流动于监管、政治和受监管行业之间的角色转换，被认为会影响独立监管机构政治化及行业俘获的风险。为检验此类流动是否更由正式规则或行业特定模式所解释，本研究采用了一项原创数据集，该数据集涵盖了葡萄牙过去三十年内十一家独立监管机构（IRA）的152位任命者。研究发现，机构形式独立性的变化影响甚微。相反，金融行业存在着门庭若市的旋转门现象，该行业监管者中，有不成比例的份额来自行业，并回归行业。进而，与葡萄牙IRA有政治联系的监管者的任命似乎与行业公共控制的遗产有关。