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This article provides an historical and theoretical account of the emerging regulatory welfare state, which is greatly understudied in contemporary regulatory and welfare research. We analyze the interplay between the welfare state and the regulatory state in an age in which regulation is expanding through liberalization, privatization, and the new public management of social services. We then provide a multi faceted framework for understanding the regulatory welfare state and discuss its implications in terms of 1) the normative social goals of the state; 2) the ways in which social policy is delivered through institutions; and 3) the implications of the framework for individuals’ rights and duties.

When state regulations prevent owners from certain uses of their property, is this action of the state a taking of property which requires compensation? One way of answering this problem, within a framework viewing property as a bundle of rights, is to inquire into whether the incident of use is an essential element of the bundle making up the property. Given the difficulties with figuring out what is essential and what is not, I propose an alternative solution, which does not give up the bundle-of-rights framework, but which, while assuming all incidents to be equally essential, it concentrates, instead, upon the legal entitlements conveying those incidents. I begin by arguing that while the incident of possession may be expressed by a right to exclude, the incident of use is expressed by a Hohfeldian liberty, and then I consider the consequences of this argument for the question of regulatory takings. I argue that while the liberty to use does not render the incident of use meaningless (at least, insofar as regulation of property use is concerned), there is nonetheless a significant distinction between transgressing a right and transgressing a liberty, and this implies that what it takes for an infringement of the right to exclude to be translated into a taking of the (whole) property is less than what it takes for the infringement of the liberty to use to be translated into a taking of property. As I show in the paper, we can achieve this result either by means of an argument from ‘constitutional residue’ or by means of an argument from the specification of constitutional rights.

This special issue examines the consequences of the ongoing power transition in the world economy for global regulatory regimes, especially the variation in rising powers' transition from rule-takers to rule-makers in global markets. This introductory article presents the analytical framework for better understanding those consequences, the Power Transition Theory of Global Economic Governance (PTT-GEG), which extends the scope of traditional power transition theory to conflict and cooperation in the international political economy and global regulatory governance. PTT-GEG emphasizes variation in the institutional strength of the regulatory state as the key conduit through which the growing market size of the emergent economies gives their governments leverage in global regulatory regimes. Whether or not a particular rising power, for a particular regulatory issue, invests its resources in building a strong regulatory state, however, is a political choice, requiring an analysis of the interplay of domestic and international politics that fuels or inhibits the creation of regulatory capacity and capability. PTT-GEG further emphasizes variation in the extent to which rising powers' substantive, policy-specific preferences diverge from the established powers' preferences as enshrined in the regulatory status quo. Divergence should not be assumed as given. Distinct combinations of these two variables yield, for each regulatory regime, distinct theoretical expectations about how the power transition in the world economy will affect global economic governance, helping us identify the conditions under which rule-takers will become regime-transforming rule-makers, regime-undermining rule-breakers, resentful rule-fakers, or regime-strengthening rule-promoters, as well as the conditions under which they remain weakly regime-supporting rule-takers.

Sasol was established and supported by the apartheid state in South Africa for its strategic position as a liquid fuel and chemical producer. The evolving government treatment of Sasol thro...

Despite negative public opinion, the role of the Korean government has expanded, while overcoming two rounds of global financial crises. The phenomenon of the re-swelling state is mainly attributed to the strengthening of the central bureaucracy, in particular the financial bureaucracy, rather than the whole central government or the state. The argument of the strengthening of the ‘state’ or the ‘government’ after economic crises might be subject to the error of generalization. Through the two rounds of economic crises, the financial bureaucracy succeeded in acquiring the authority of market supervision and industrial support. In consequence, the bureaucracy's institutional supremacy within the government grew less challenged. The central bureaucracy was no longer the loyal servant to the President. It has reinforced its institutional strength and autonomy vis-a-vis the President, the National Assembly, the Central Bank and civil society, under the pretext of building up the rational and autonomou...

The paper analyzes the historical evolution of the production of liquid bioenergy in the US on the basis of the political economy of fuels for road transport, largely determined by the dynamics of the opportunity cost that arises from the connection between energy and agricultural markets. We have developed an analysis framework to build a set of scenarios suitable to explain the evolution of biofuel markets in the historical period analyzed. These scenarios, strongly associated with conditions of convergence and conflict between the regulatory state and the agro-industry, have then been statistically verified using an interrupted time series analysis. The analysis shows that the evolution of governance, institutions, and markets around bioenergy have been determined not just by the political goals of the US regulatory state, but also by private economic drivers related to agro-industry. This suggests that bioenergy transition in the US can be understood as the agricultural dimension of the political economy that underlies the socio-technical regime of energy for transport in the US, characterized by institutional inertia and technological lock-in.

What are the origins of global regulation? This article proposes that the developmental state — the state investing in economic development — can be a source of global environmental regulation. Through industrial policy, the developmental state can promote structural economic change in polluting sectors that supports global regulatory policy in two ways: first, providing state support to green industries creates economic interests in support of global regulation; and, second, driving down the cost of technology through government subsidies alters the pay-offs of global cooperation for other states. This article examines the two mechanisms in the case of climate change: the global leadership of the European Union; and international cooperation on the Paris Agreement. The argument advances our theory of the state in global regulatory politics as both a developmental and a regulatory force. This article identifies significant scope for the developmental strategies of major economies to change the interest and cost structures of polluting sectors to support global environmental regulation.

This chapter is a specific Scandinavian impact analysis. This chapter analyzes the rise and the concept of the regulatory state in Europe and its impact on Scandinavian democratic welfare state governance. Analysis studies usually are comparative studies of different government structures, in this case in Scandinavia and the EU. Here, we study the transition of the national state order in the wake of the change from government to dominant non-parliamentarian regulatory democratic governance. The universal welfare state is, despite prevailing and costing the taxpayers a huge amount of money, undermined by regulatory interventions. The welfare state is considered to be common sense and has government support. This support is, however, conditional and dependent on commercial market values as the outcome and no longer solely based on the production of collective welfare goods for all. The welfare state has become regulatory.

The proliferation of production networks and cross-border contracting is frequently cited as empowering globally active corporations to skirt, and shape, national regulations. While scholars often focus on the political gains from these new forms of business organization, we shift the conversation to the potential political costs of global firm reorganization. The spread of corporate subsidiaries and global supply-chain networks leave firms vulnerable to a host of jurisdictional claims, and by targeting a domestically rooted affiliate, states can bring the global practices of the multinational corporation in line with their interests. In other words, states can take advantage of the transnationalization of the firm to transnationalize their authority beyond traditional jurisdictional boundaries. We label this process “networked liabilities.” Specifically, the combination of a firm’s sunk costs and the country’s jurisdictional substitutability determines the ability of governments to exert demands on multinational corporations. A key contribution of the article is to better specify the relationship between mobility and authority and to illustrate that networked liabilities can further empower a variety of states beyond traditional economic powers like the US or the European Union. We further highlight when firms may curtail the authority of great powers. The growing reach of the regulatory state domestically, coupled with the transnationalization of the firm, creates an increasing number of tools for certain governments to engage in economic statecraft beyond their borders. Our findings, then, contribute to debates on business–government relations in a globalized world, the changing nature of political risk, and the deterritorialization of state authority.

Evidence-based regulation is a term of art which refers to the process of making decisions about regulation based on evidence generated through systematic research. There is increasing pressure to treat evidence-based regulation as a global best practice, including from US political interests hoping to tame the regulatory state, the OECD, international trade agreements, and academics. However, there are certain conditions under which evidence-based regulation is likely to be a less appealing method of decision-making than the alternative, namely, relying on judgment. Those conditions are: it is difficult to collect data, on either interventions or outcomes; accurate causal inferences are difficult to draw; there is little warrant for believing that the same causal relationships will apply in a new context; or, the decision-makers in question lack the capacity to undertake one of these tasks. These conditions are likely to be present in complex, transnational, decentralized and dynamic forms of business regulation that extend to relatively poor countries. The global anti-bribery regime is an illustrative case.

Energy is regulated by the state in most countries. The United Kingdom had a period, around the turn of the present century, when traditional regulation was reduced and the energy sector was exposed to market forces, but there has since been reversion to the regulatory norm. The recent history of energy policy, especially as it concerns electricity generation, is examined and the stated reasons for having such a policy are discussed: for example, enhancing security of supply, avoiding the effects of fossil fuel price increases and combating future climate change and its effects. These reasons are found to lack substance and a case is made for moving away from centralised action, returning to a much more competitive market with less government intervention.

This study explains the limits of institutional transformation in Korea from the developmental state to a post-developmental state, in terms of regulatory institutions instead of developmental institutions. The Korean state has taken advantage of the government's discretionary policy changes and power formed by both informal state institutions and informal policy networks, while the regulatory state has placed a special emphasis on social consensus as well as political support for changes of market institutions. New market rules and laws have also been inefficient and ineffective for fair market competition. Limits of regulatory governance change have occurred due to misalignments between informal regulatory institutions in the developmental state and formal regulatory institutions in the post-developmental state. State managers have created discretionary state intervention in policy implementation, politicized the roles of regulatory agencies, and brought ministry-type regulatory state institutio...

During the long Progressive Era (1885–1918) progressive reformers transformed American government, American higher education, and American economics, all in the name of regulating a transformed economy. Economic progress, they argued successfully, required the creation of a powerful regulatory state, guided by expert economic advisers, whose scientific training and credentials were supplied by the nascent research universities. Progressive economists called this new model of economic governance social control. Social control was less a coherent agenda of substantive goals than it was a technocratic theory and practice of how best to obtain them—a progressive method of economic governance. Though American economics cast its vocational lot with the regulatory state, left and right progressive economists offered different visions of the state's role in economic life—managerial and market capitalism, respectively—which arose from differing conceptions of how a modern, industrialized economy functioned, and which evolved with the shifting vocational opportunities presented by recurring crisis. Different visions of the state's role in economic life, in turn, implied different conceptions of what economic experts do.

Many argue today that global governance is ‘in crisis’. This reflects an undue emphasis on the fate of multilateral institutions: if they are deadlocked, global governance does not appear to be progressing. This is misplaced. Today, global governance is increasingly being pursued not by erecting supranational institutions empowered to govern issue areas directly, but by transforming states’ internal governance to enact international disciplines domestically. In many policy domains, efforts are underway to reshape state institutions, laws and governance processes in accordance with global priorities, regulatory standards and action plans. However, because these moves privilege certain interests and ideologies over others, this is a heavily contested process. The politics of global governance thus occurs not just at the global level, but at the local level too. The argument in this article is illustrated using examples from maritime security and anti-money laundering governance.

Deregulation is often followed by reregulation. This article studies why moves towards autonomy frequently appear to be followed by the imposition of new regulatory controls. Reregulation has two dimensions: the layering of different control mechanisms and the growth of rules within those layers. Using a case study of social housing in Belgium, we study the social mechanisms of professionalization and bureaucratization to explain reregulation. We attribute the layering of rules to a conflict over oversight between the established legal profession and an ascending management profession. We also find that Crozier’s vicious circle of bureaucratization helps to explain the growth of regulation. The legal culture of the Rechtsstaat seems to be a catalyst for both social mechanisms.

Higher levels of government expenditures and more regulation naturally invite corruption, because they provide the opportunity for government officials to be paid off for regulatory favors, subsidies, and government contracts. Some countries have relatively large governments but lower levels of corruption. Scandinavian countries offer examples. While institutional differences may explain some of the cross-country differences in corruption, the most consistent relationship is that high levels of regulation are associated with more corruption. When looking at the effect of the size of government, it is the regulatory state, rather than the productive or redistributive state, that is associated with corruption.

Over the last 30 years, the U.S. states has retreated from its regulatory responsibility over private-sector economic activities. Over the same period, a celebratory literature, mostly in political science, has developed, characterizing the current period as the rise of the regulatory state or regulatory capitalism. The notion of regulation in this literature, however, is a perverse one—one in which regulators mostly advise rather than direct, and industry and firm self-regulation is the norm. As a result, new and potentially dangerous technologies such as fracking or mortgage backed derivatives are left unregulated, and older necessary regulations such as prohibitions are weakened. This article provides a joint criticism of the celebratory literature and the deregulation reality, and strongly advocates for a new sociology of regulation that both recognizes and documents these failures.

The regulatory agency responsible for prudential supervision of the banks in China, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), is not an independent authority. The agency's regulatory actions are constrained by the central government, which has to balance the prudential and non-prudential consequences of bank regulation for its political survival. The conditions and limits of the government's influence on the CBRC is analysed through an investigation of three regulatory cases. The conclusion is that the CBRC's regulatory actions are determined by the relative importance of prudential outcomes for the government's policy objectives.

The paper makes three claims: first that regulatory state making and market making in higher education is intertwined through a project of market citizenship that shapes the ‘publicness’ of higher education. Second, we argue that these projects of market citizenship are variegated and in Australia has taken the form of accommodation—via regulation tools—between social democratic and market elements, and finally we argue that the effect of this new regulatory state is a strategy to depoliticise the governance of higher education. Policy making appears to be the application of a set of technical rules rather than political decisions about the allocation of values.

The fundamental research question we seek to answer is this: why has this resource boom, say in contrast with the Korean War and post Second World War booms, not produced long-term political and policy reforms to accommodate the distribution and uneven impact which are the inevitable consequences of the rise in commodity prices? In answering this question, the argument we advance is that the political and policy responses to the current boom must be located in the context of shifts in power and interests in the domestic political economy and in the broader regionalisation of the political economy that have entrenched new transnational and regional forms of capital. An important dimension of this state transformation is the transformation of subnational state institutions and the emergence of what we call the local regulatory state – and its reflection in the territorial politics between resource-rich Australian states and the Federal government. The recent boom in Australia has seen some subnation...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the long-run economic structure and economic policy consequences of wide-spread blockchain adoption.Design/methodology/approachThe approach uses institutional, organisational and evolutionary economic theory to predict consequences of blockchain innovation for economic structure (dehierarchicalisation) and then to further predict the effect of that structural change on the demand for economic policy.FindingsThe paper makes two key predictions. First, that blockchain adoption will cause both market disintermediation and organisational dehierarchicalisation. And second, that these structural changes will unwind some of the rationale for economic policy developed through the twentieth century that sought to control the effects of market power and organisational hierarchy.Research limitations/implicationsThe core implication that the theoretical prediction made in this paper is that wide-spread blockchain technology adoption could reduce the need for counter-veiling economic policy, and therefore limiting the role of government.Originality/valueThe paper takes a standard prediction made about blockchain adoption, namely disintermediation (or growth of markets), and extends it to point out that the same effect will occur to organisations. It then notes that much of the rationale for economic policy, and especially industry and regulatory policy through the twentieth century was justified in order to control economic power created by hierarchical organisations. The surprising implication, then, is that blockchain adoption weakens the rationale for such economic policy. This reveals the long-run relationship between digital technological innovation and the regulatory state.

Post-industrial economies are at a crossroad. On the one hand countries are dealing with the crisis of unemployment and underemployment, developing strategies to increase labor market participation of all adults, and increase productivity. On the other hand, the same countries are responding to demographic concerns regarding an aging population and decreased birth ratios. These concerns, coupled with a growing demand for gender equality in the labor market, and better work/family balance, lead to the development of new tax and welfare policies around child care, as well as restructuring the workplace to fit the needs of workers with familial care obligations. A storm of new legislation, regulation and voluntary initiatives attempting to address child care, parental leaves, and the structure of the work day, are sweeping through developed economies, with significant innovation, variation, and experimentation. The feminist policy and scholarly debate around these policies seem to presume that market based mechanisms for the promotion of gender equality are inferior to state based mechanisms, and that generally, those who care about gender equality should be suspicious of turning to the market for solutions, because it is an institution that tends to replicate rather than ameliorate gender inequality. In this paper we seek to question market aversion within these debates. In particular, we ask whether the theoretical premise of the discussion - the harsh dichotomy between market and state - is plausible at all, and particularly at the current moment in the development of the regulatory state. Using examples from the fields of welfare, tax and employment law from a variety of post-industrial “developed” economies, we seek to destabilize the dichotomy and explore the wide array of policy tools on the spectrum between pure market-based policies and strictly state provided benefits. We offer a systemic analysis that exposes the myriad possible legal and institutional configuration available to policy makers. Our analysis is grounded in an explicit and multifaceted discussion of the normative considerations that underlie policies aimed as regulating both the labor market and care work: namely, Distributive Justice (including gender equality); Efficiency; and Autonomy (including personhood and community). Part I of the article offers a rich account of each of these normative considerations and explains the complex (both positive and negative) effects of both market and state-governed mechanisms on promoting them. Good policy, we argue, should not sweepingly reject market mechanisms nor should it abandon state governed instruments but rather mix and match the advantages of both state and market mechanisms focusing on their potential real-life consequences. We use some examples from our comparative study in order to illustrate the potential for such hybrid mechanisms. We model the complex implications, seemingly technical legal mechanisms entail, and explain the unique mix of normative goals supported by each mechanism. In part II, building on the previous part, we offer a framework to analyze and develop policy that promotes gender equality in the family and the market, in the fields of tax, welfare and employment. In order to methodically decipher the different mechanisms available, and to be able to match them with the normative goals, as well as creatively think about possible institutional options, we build on existing literature to offer a typology of policy solutions along four mechanism-design criteria: (1) universal v. Selective (2) fixed sum v. income dependent (3) cash transfers v. in kind services (4) which institution provides the service (family, state, market, civil society). Each of these criteria reflect tensions between the underlying normative goals, and each represents a distinction between ideal type mechanisms that can, and we argue that should be, broken up and understood as a spectrum of modular tools to be mixed and matched in order to support varying combinations of normative ends.

This essay views The Modern Corporation and Private Property from the perspective of its junior coauthor, Gardiner Means. Means generated the book’s statistical showings of deepening corporate concentration and widening separation of ownership and control, studies also included in a Ph.D. dissertation Means successfully submitted to the Harvard economics department a year after the book’s publication. The dissertation also included a chapter, never published and rejected by the dissertation committee, that set out a theory administered prices. The theory lays out the statistical results’ implications for public policy. In Means’s view, Adam Smith’s picture of supply, demand, and automatic market correction had been partially eclipsed by inflexible pricing administered by corporate managers. Growing corporate concentration exacerbated these “administrated” prices’ distortionary effects. The theory explained the Great Depression’s persistence and yielded a detailed list of problems to be addressed by a new regulatory state. The chapter, only alluded to in the book, provides essential explication of its excursuses on corporate power and social welfare, for it explains in hard economic terms just what Berle and Means thought that “neutral technocrats” in the corporate sector could do to make the economy work better. The essay goes on to describe Means’s later articulations of the theory and to compare his later career path to that of Berle.

This is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article International security debates surrounding the European Union energy supply challenge commonly invoke the need for more EU hard power – e.g. getting tough on Russia or engaging directly with other exporters. This article investigates whether what might be labelled ‘soft power with a hard edge’ instead amounts to a consistent policy strategy for the EU. The central argument is that the EU has turned a weakness into a strength, and developed a set of tools that sharpen the way soft power is exercised in the energy sector. The article explores how soft power affects companies that ‘come and play’ on the EU market: the rules of the Single European Market and how they affect external firms. It also assesses the long reach of the SEM: both the gravitational ‘pull’ the SEM exerts in the ‘near aboard’, and the EU’s ‘push’ to facilitate the development of midstream infrastructure and upstream investment. The conclusion is that the EU regulatory state is emerging as an international energy actor in its own right. It limits the ways states like Russia can use state firms in the geopolitical game; and it exports its model into the near abroad thus stabilizing energy supply and transit routes. 1, Forfatterversjon

The objective of this paper is to present a legal theory of agency selection. The theory posits why certain legal forms of agency are chosen when agencies are created by the executive branch of government. At the core of the theory is the idea that the executive branch chooses agency forms that strike a politically optimal balance between maximising its control while minimising its legal and political accountability for agency activities. This optimal balance is determined on an issue by issue basis. As such, the rise of the regulatory state has provided a means by which the executive branch of government has been able to strategically choose to divest itself of and minimise its legal accountability for the administration of government while, at the same time, maintaining effective political control of the administrative arm of government.

In a regulatory state the purpose of intervention by any Independent Regulatory Agency (IRA) is not only regulation in the strict sense but also the supervision of the activity of institutions providing a specific service, particularly the utilities. However, given the evolution of most market economies, namely in transition countries, it is necessary to design new governance arrangements that enable an effective, transparent and truly independent intervention of IRAs. The objectives of this study are a) to analyse of the institutional-design chosen for some independent regulatory agencies and its regulatory framework, namely in northern economies, and b) to suggest the need to strengthen governance arrangements to effectively guarantee regulatory independence, transparency and accountability, therefore promoting a true sunshine regulation in southern economies. The authors conclude that strengthening accountability arrangements is the most important mechanism to avoid regulators capture from the government and regulated organisations. It is also concluded that the way regulators have chosen can also influence the way IRA conducts its activity. Therefore, it is suggested that board accountability can be enhanced by the generalization of the principle of the public contest of regulators.

This chapter offers a selective critical review of studies on regulatory regimes in member states and at the EU level, especially regarding the most recent advancements on multi-level regulatory regimes, accountability, and legitimacy. We will briefly examine theoretical work dealing with the conceptualization of such regimes, and compare and contrast it to other notions that are used to denote similar phenomena, i.e. that of so-called regulatory spaces. Further, national and sectoral variations of regulatory regimes allow us to elaborate on the rise and evolution of the regulatory state in Europe. A discussion on the development and effectiveness of multi-level regulatory regimes, which emerge primarily through regulatory networks, follows. Finally, regulatory regimes on finance and environmental sustainability are presented as empirical examples.

There is a natural tension between theories of party government and theories of regulatory politics. Whereas effective party government requires that politicians have firm control over public policy, the need for credible commitment in regulation stipulates that policy-making capacities are delegated to independent agencies. While the theoretical dimension of this tension is well established, there is little research that examines its empirical implications. To narrow this gap, the analysis assesses whether legal agency independence limits the influence of parties on agency executives. To that end, it investigates the careers of 300 CEOs in 100 West European regulatory agencies. The analysis shows that high levels of agency independence protect appointees with opposition ties from early removal. This presents some of the first evidence to suggest that the institutional response to credibility pressures limits the political use of the appointment channel and, thus, has the potential to constrain party control in regulatory politics.

In this paper, we follow the theoretical framework proposed by Djankov et al. (2003) to investigate the role of the state in resolving business disputes and its impact on enterprise performance. Using a survey of private enterprises in China, we first construct an index to quantify the power of the state vis-a-vis the market in resolving business disputes, and then find that enterprises located in regions where the government has a greater relative power enjoy better performance. Our results suggest that the regulatory state has played a positive role in the economic transition in China.

This paper discusses the main aspects of the competitive and regulatory state of the postal sector. It presents the different models for postal competition and regulation in the EU and the US and their history, together with their implications on regulation, with a focus on universal services and network access. While postal monopolies used to be the main source of funding for universal service obligations, the need for alternative funding sources after full liberalization has increased the interest of regulators and the public in knowing the cost of these obligations. In parallel, new means of electronic communication and consumer needs call the traditional scope of universal services into question. This paper outlines the economic rationale of current policies and directions for future postal regulation to strengthen the postal services' commercial viability in a competitive age, while safeguarding their relevant characteristics for the economy.

For more than half a century Euro elites succeeded in presenting integration as a positive-sum game, with economic benefits more than compensating for the limitations of supranational democracy. Since the beginning of the euro crisis, however, even the most inattentive citizen of the EU realizes that integration entails serious normative costs as well as some economic benefits. As the crisis intensifies, all proposed ad hoc solutions tend to aggravate the democratic deficit of the Union. It is not only the citizens that are being excluded from the debate about the future of the eurozone; most national governments are forced to accept solutions proposed by a few leaders representing the major stockholders of the European Central Bank. Thus, the risk of a total normative loss – a default rather than a simple deficit of democracy at the European level – is now quite concrete.

Purpose– What seems like a new social anthropology of global regulation is an endeavour much too grand for this paper, even though it has much merit. To contain the analysis which follows, the discussion of social embeddedness will be restricted to a comparison of markets which retain some local or regional integrity from those which have become largely removed from cultural or communal social bonds. An example is between markets trading in goods and services with a consumer base which is local and subsistence, and markets in derivative products that are inextricably dependent on supranational location. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– North World regulatory principle operates within consolidated state frameworks, dislocated market societies and reflects socially disembedded productivity relationships. The same could be said for dominant economic regulatory scholarship. More recent efforts to develop critical analysis of South World regulatory problems and answers have consistently remained connected to the referent of the regulatory state. This paper questions the utility of such a comparative conviction in a global governance reality wherein South World regulatory environments are largely subject to North World state interests and multi-national opportunism fostered by disaggregated, often dysfunctional, domestic states.Findings– If, as in many South World contexts, the state is dysfunctional or destructive in translating regulatory principle, then what are the social bonds which advance the integrity of regulatory principle, and what of externalities which work to draw culturally located principle towards a more hegemonic regulatory project? Could appreciating the relationship between regulatory principle and social bonding be exhibited in degrees of market embeddedness? Might the reimagining of regulatory principle be possible by reflecting on motives and outcomes for regulation that have other than wealth maximization as core value? The paper answers these conjectures as a basis for empirical research.Research limitations/implications– In the spirit of regulatory anthropology it is not helpful to remain immersed in some strained geographic regulatory dichotomy, employing some good state/bad state polarity. Neither World exists in regulatory isolation. International regulatory organizations ensure this through their Western/Northern development models, and perpetuate post-colonial influences over South World development agendas. That said, there are two regulatory worlds, and hybrids between. Despite this, regulatory principle is not immune from cultural forces and social bonding. The paper addresses various dualities in order to propose a new way of viewing South World regulatory paradigms.Practical implications– The framework for analysis will enable a repositioning of critical scholarship and regulatory policy away from the model frameworks of consolidated states and towards the real regulatory needs and potentials of the South World.Social implications– Through applying the analytical technique of social embeddedness above market community paradigms this analysis offers a novel approach to exploring economy in contexts where markets are not dislocated and products are not fictitious. In this way the contemporary materialist economic crisis can be viewed against principles of sustainability rather than growth, productivity and exchange.Originality/value– The paper draws upon established scholarship regarding market embeddedness and social bonding but unique in applying this to a South World void of regulatory discourse set free of comparison with inappropriate regulatory state referents.

As China proceeds with a process of urbanization unprecedented in human history, it maintains an urban-biased governance regime in many areas, including food safety regulation. Using secondary data and interviews with officials from the Changping district in Beijing, this article systematically defines the main characteristics of China's dual food safety regulation regimes, highlighting differences between urban and rural areas in four dimensions: policy structure, funding source, staff structure and resource allocation. This article also provides an explanatory framework to understand this dual regime's development and persistence from a neo-institutionalism perspective. Three main explanatory variables are advanced: historical legacy, dual incentive structures, and dual economic and industrial patterns. While China's urbanization process and governance structure, including the food safety regulatory regime, are not complete by Western standards, we emphasize this problem is best understood by examining ...

This article examines institutional change in a case that was expected to be particularly resilient but showed considerable structural transformation: the institutionalization of the regulatory state in Switzerland. This process is illustrated through the establishment of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) in four areas: banking and finance; telecommunications; electricity; and competition. The theoretical framework developed by Streeck, Thelen and Mahoney is used to explore hypotheses about the modes of institutional change, with the methodology of diachronic within-case study. Results confirm only partially the expectations, pointing to layering and displacement as the prevalent modes of change. The concluding part discusses the type and the direction of change as additional explanatory factors. Points for practitioners This article examines the institutional development of the regulatory state in Switzerland through the establishment of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). Different modes of change are illustrated through the analysis of the processes leading to agencification in four areas: banking and finance; telecommunication; electricity; and competition. Results suggest that the dynamics of re-regulation follow a quite different logic compared to the general trend towards liberalization. What is more, the empirical analysis indicates that independent regulatory agencies are mostly created by importing exogenous models in the case of the ‘positive’ reform of previously self-regulated sectors, while they are established along existing institutional arrangements when reforming former state-owned enterprises or publicly regulated sectors.

The objective of this article is to examine the structural change in government that has enabled the politically strategic changes in governance seen in many OECD countries over the past several decades. In so doing, the legal structures and political strategies underlying the regulatory state are explained. Drawing upon classical theories of the division of labour, two distinct divisions of labour - one legal, the other political - are identified that provide insight into the relationship between the legal structure and political strategies underpinning the emergence of the regulatory state. The implications of this article are that it provides a description of how the executive branch has been able to shift the balance of power significantly in its favour while at the same time divesting itself of its core constitutional tasks of governing the administrative arm of government.

What accounts for the excesses of the regulatory state? Economists have shown that bad regulations are often due to “rent seeking” and “regulatory capture” and have provided compelling accounts of the incentives that drive these processes. However, there remain many unwarranted regulations, such as recent gun control measures, that cannot be explained by an economic rationale. Rather, it is essential to understand the distinctively ideological origins and functions of such regulations. This paper examines both the economic and ideological corruptions on the regulatory state, suggesting that those concerned with the growth of state power will have to address both of these phenomena.

What have been the effects of coalition government on the British regulatory state? This article argues that the politics of regulation have been largely about a continuation of existing patterns, namely volatile stability rather than more far-reaching change. The British regulatory state continues to be defined by boundary conflicts between the world of 'politics' and 'regulation', by conflicting calls for centralisation and decentralised autonomy, and by tensions between the wish to 'reduce' regulation and the realisation of inherent complexities.

In Europe, the rise of the regulatory state was accompanied by a broad diffusion of research on the processes of privatisation, liberalisation, and reregulation of utilities, previously managed directly by the state. This article offers an empirical and theoretical discussion of the paradigm of the regulatory state. It proposes to evaluate the transformation of the actual functions of the welfare state in a context of reforms of network industries over the last twenty years. Relying on cases from the electricity and railways sectors, it studies the changing balance between the traditional functions of the welfare state and the new regulatory functions introduced by the reforms. This article explains how, alongside the strengthening of regulatory functions, states maintained and developed powerful redistribution functions. The emerging regulatory state is not substituted for the positive/welfare state, but partly juxtaposed with it, making the structures for governing these sectors much less easy to read.

The growth of the modern regulatory state is often explained in terms of an unambiguous increase in regulation driven by the actions of central governments. Contrary to this traditional narrative, we argue that as governments increased state capacity, they often strove to weaken the autarkic tendencies of regional laws, thereby promoting greater trade and a more integrated market. To show this, we exploit a quasi-natural experiment generated in the French wine industry by a law implemented on 1 January 1901 which lowered and harmonized various local tax rates. We demonstrate that high internal taxes on wine, set by regional governments, discouraged trade and protected small producers of expensive and low quality wines. We then trace how the political response to this tax decrease led to increases in wine regulation.

Peter Lawler’s insightful critique of American individualism offers many important lessons, but his diagnosis of our economic situation is overly optimistic. Indeed, “big government” is more of a problem than Lawler suggests. This essay draws on two central figures of Lawler’s analysis—Locke and Hegel—to explore the problems that individualism poses for modern political economy. Although individualism is unlikely to make the regulatory state or welfare state wither away, the psychology of individualism confirms the importance of cultivating forms of recognition beyond economic life.

This article uses a policy network perspective to assess the independence of regulatory agencies (RAs) in liberalized public utility sectors. We focus on the de facto independence of RAs from elected politicians, regulatees and other co-regulators. We go further than previous studies, which only undertook a general analysis of the de jure independence of RAs from political authorities. Specifically, we apply a social network analysis (SNA), which concentrates on the attributes and relational profiles of all actors involved in new regulatory arrangements. The concept of de facto independence is applied to the Swiss telecommunications sector in order to provide initial empirical insights. Results clearly show that SNA indicators are an appropriate tool to identify the de facto independence of RAs and can improve knowledge about the issues arising from the emergence of the regulatory State'.