The current financial crisis has raised several important questions concerning certain widely held assumptions and theories about the role of regulation in modern democracies. The last two decades have been marked by increasing importance of political neutrality, technical exprertise and politics/administration dichotomy. We witnessed the emergence of a new paradigm, that of "regulatory state", replacing the »old fashioned« interventionist Keynesian state. The central features of this new regulatory state were new independent regulatory agencies, strong courts and other quasi-judicial independent bodies.