The European Union’s regulatory agencies enjoy a comprehensive portfolio of competences and play a critical role at several stages of the EU’s policy-making process. They supply the European Commission with independent expertise, set standards in specific policy areas and monitor the implementation of EU rules. This broad set of powers comes with a catch, however: EU agencies need to cultivate their organisational reputation among external audiences to foster their autonomy from political actors, yet due to their various roles tend to face conflicting expectations from these audiences. In their article “Meeting expectations in the EU regulatory state? Regulatory communications amid conflicting institutional demands” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Madalina Busuioc and Dovilė Rimkutė explore how EU regulatory agencies respond to the expectations of multiple audiences. Madalina and Dovilė develop a novel dictionary to analyse the text of every annual report published by the EU’s regulatory agencies and identify which aspects of their reputation agencies emphasise, how these vary over time, and why. Results of their analysis suggest that EU regulatory agencies become more strategic over time in their communication and diversify their reputational repertoire: “[r]ather than boldly venturing into ‘moral’ legitimation grounds, their communication efforts have expanded into performative aspects, consistent with the EU’s regulatory state output legitimation criteria for its regulators.”