Do Organizational Characteristics Really Matter for Institutional Change? The Case of Pharmaceutical Regulation in France and England

When it comes to economic regulation, institutional change has traditionally been examined through the lens of agency theory, which contrasts the strictness of traditional bureaucratic structures with the fluidity attributed to regulatory entities organized around the principles of New Public Management. In this paper, we challenge this assumption, on the basis of a comparative analysis of the evolutions of the regulation of the pharmaceutical market in France and England. To explain the nature and pace of institutional change, we insist on the role played by the order of reforms and on power relationships within sectors. During the 1990s and 2000s, both countries did indeed follow symmetrically diverging paths. While, first of all, an NPM agency was created in England, a classic, command-and-control bureaucracy was created in France. Each entity was then affected by reforms aiming at limiting its prerogatives. We show how past policy choices and actors’ positioning explain the requalification of these projects in both cases, more than the dominant organizational feature in either of the two countries.