TH02-2
The Dynamics of Multi-Level Regulatory Negotiation Across Policy Domains
The literature on regulation has been largely framed around the concept of regulatory “capture” by powerful supplier groups, particularly concentrated industries. This concept was most notably elaborated by George Stigler, Mancur Olson, and James Q. Wilson. In recent years, however, a growing number of studies have thrown the notion of industry capture into question. Instead of rational-actor theories of capture through rent-seeking behavior, scholars have examined a much broader spectrum of motivations and goals that animate the key actors in regulatory negotiations.
To illuminate the range of new approaches in the literature, this panel includes papers by researchers who are actively conducting empirical research on regulation in different substantive areas. In order to illuminate how pivotal actors populate different bargaining arenas, the papers also intentionally emphasize quite different levels of analysis. They all devote some attention to the linkage between domestic politics and international dynamics. These linkages begin at the organization level in some papers and at the national level in others. In some papers, the international level provides the relevant outcomes produced by domestic actors, in others, the relevant constraints that limit domestic outcomes.
The paper by Matthew Amengual and coauthors examines firm-level data to examine how workplace regulations affect the preferences of managers in 67 different countries. Based on their findings, the authors then relate managerial preferences to a series of political-economy outcomes, including trade, FDR, and human-resource practices. Farrell and Newman focus most heavily (among these four papers) at the level of international outcomes by analyzing negotiations over information-sharing toward the competing goals of counter-terrorism and the protection of privacy. The paper by Yves Tiberghien focuses on domestic efforts to balance innovation and precaution in China’s efforts to strengthen rules for biosafety, with direct effects on China’s participation in forums for international governance. The paper by Ziegler takes a different policy domain – financial market regulation – and investigates how different jurisdictions are changing the way banks can organize their business activities. The paper analyzes the role taken by pro-reform advocacy organizations as well as professional elites in using expertise to counterbalance the influence of the financial-services industry in defining the goals to be pursued by public regulators.