Detecting and Comparing Institutional Change: Evidence from Consumer/User Protection’s Salience in Telecommunications in Nine European Countries

This article aims to provide an original contribution to the still-hidden perspective of comparison in institutional change. Relying on the existing literature on institutional entrepreneurship (IE), the study aims to test a new typology that better investigates different institutional entrepreneurship modes from a comparative perspective. The typology distinguishes four modes of IE: integrative, contested, legitimizing, and opportunistic. We validate the typology by investigating the level and content of consumer/ user protection salience in annual reports of nine European independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) in the telecommunications (TLCs) sector over ten years (2003- 1014). Evidence highlights the existence of different institutional and policy entrepreneurship styles, within and across countries, around the same policy issues. It reveals that IE is far from a monolithic entity.