Rebuilding Regulatory Trust, but How? Lessons From European Financial Regulation

ABSTRACT

Over the past few decades, trust has emerged as a cornerstone of regulatory governance scholarship. Yet, despite a rise in regulatory crises and growing institutional contestation, we still know surprisingly little about how trust can be repaired once shattered. This article addresses this gap by developing a general analytical framework for regulatory trust repair, adapting insights from management scholarship to the context of regulation. The framework is then systematically tested through the particular case of European financial regulation—an unlikely case given the severity of the financial and eurozone crises, yet one in which a gradual pattern of recovery is documented. Through deductive theory‐testing process tracing, the analysis suggests that, even after catastrophic breakdowns, a combination of three mechanisms—public investigations providing a diagnosis of failure, substantive and institutional reforms reducing the risk of reoccurrence, and heightened transparency demonstrating renewed trustworthiness—can be jointly sufficient to repair trust in regulation.