Social Regulation and Explanations of Regulatory Failure.

It used to be commonly accepted that regulatory agencies in the United States were doomed to fall under the control of the industry with which they dealt and thus be captured by it. This article considers the degree to which explanations of such capture were vindicated by the social regulatory agencies created in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s which were designed to withstand the pressures identified by political scientists as leading to the capture of regulatory agencies. The political scientists who identified the factors leading to the capture of regulatory agencies in America are found to have been partly vindicated by the history of the new social regulatory agencies. There are important reasons for the failure of the new social regulatory agencies, however, which were not identified by such writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]