The Role of Regulatory Agencies in Framing Public Problems: An Empirical Analysis

This paper sheds light on the role of regulatory agencies in framing public problems. It is well acknowledged that regulatory agencies are becoming key actors in the policy process. To this extent, a common understanding regarding the delegation of regulatory agencies relates to the fact that they solve problems rather than define them. Although the literature on framing and regulatory agencies is abundant, studies questioning the combination of these two phenomena are scarce. In this paper, a specific “framing index” is developed to measure the involvement of 36 regulators in framing issues in two sectors, namely food safety and environmental protection. This measurement is applied to a cross‐national and cross‐sectorial fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fs QCA ). The main results indicate that when agencies are highly involved in framing, they are old, they have a low number of staff members, and the risk of venue shifting is low.