The European Union is becoming a regulatory state with many faces. Classical top-down regulatory policy is joined by less authoritative, less interventionist and more participatory regulatory forms. At least in part, these regulatory experiments are intended to improve the quality of governing in the EU both from an output (decision making, implementation, problem solving) and input (democratic quality) perspective. This paper has two aims: To arrive at a differentiated picture of the EU regulatory state, we develop a typology of different modes of EU regulation ranging from classical legal instruments to softer forms of steering the economy and society. In a second step we are looking at the regulatory transition from a normative angle and analyse the various types of regulation employed in EU policy making on the basis of several evaluation criteria, offering a critical commentary on regulatory modes and trends.