Influencing Policy Transnationally: Pro-and Anti-Tobacco Global Advocacy Networks

Using the global tobacco advocacy networks as a case study, this article argues that the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1999), which theorises how advocacy coalitions affect policymaking domestically, and Keck and Sikkink's research into transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink 1998) can provide insights into the mechanisms of how transnational advocacy networks impact both local and intergovernmental policymaking. I argue that by combining aspects of each of these approaches, all sides of a policy situation can be analysed. I contrast these approaches with the epistemic communities approach (Haas 1992), suggesting that, for the tobacco policy system, the epistemic communities approach provides less insight than the other two.     

Constructing and contesting City of London power: NGOs and the emergence of noisier financial politics

Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This paper acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008 the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to global finance, and a more pessimistic reading. We demonstrate how macro-narratives and public story-telling both construct and contest City and financial sector power. In a new pattern since the financial crash, NGOs have moved from campaigns of limited duration and narrow focus, to a more sustained presence on macro-structural issues. Adopting a supply–demand framework for assessing governance and regulatory change, we look at the emergence of TheCityUK as a new advocacy arm and the strategies of three of the more prominent and focused NGOs that have mobilized in the aftermath of the crash: the Tax Justice Network’s (TJN) use of the ‘finance curse’; Positive Money on private endogenous money creation; and Finance Watch counterweight strategies at the level of the European Union. We suggest these mobilizations highlight the need for a more concerted and orchestrated construction of a global institutional civil society infrastructure in finance (a global financial public sphere) to achieve greater access, resources, scrutiny and oversight for a range of specialist expert NGOs.     

Regulating finance after the crisis: Unveiling the different dynamics of the regulatory process

It is now widely recognized that regulatory failures contributed to the onset of the global financial crisis. Redressing such failures has, thus, been a key policy priority in the post‐crisis reform agenda at both the domestic and international levels. This special issue investigates the process of post‐crisis financial regulatory reform in a number of crucial issue areas, including the rules and arrangements that govern financial supervision, offshore financial centers and shadow banking, the financial industry's involvement in global regulatory processes, and macroeconomic modeling. In so doing, the main purpose of this special issue is to shed light on an often understudied aspect in regulation literature: the variation in the dynamics of regulatory change. Contributors examine the different dynamics of regulatory change observed post‐crisis and explain variations by accounting for the interaction between institutional factors, on the one hand, and the activity of change agents and veto players involved in the regulatory reform process, on the other.     

Power transition and the regulatory state in large emerging markets: Norm-breaking after the global financial crisis

I examine the ways in which the global financial crisis that began in 2007, and whose effects arguably condition policymaking to the present day, affected the ongoing global power transition as manifested by the unilateral decisions undertaken by official agencies comprising national regulatory states. The theory of that power transition articulated in the overview paper of this Special Issue is reinterpreted to take into account the circumstances of that crisis. Empirical evidence on the propensity to discriminate against foreign commercial interests by the BRICS, Turkey, the European Union, and the United States during the years 2008 to 2017 at, and behind, the border is employed to identify a group of six potential rule-shapers and two possible sham rule-takers.     

Capturing the Moment? Crisis,Market Accountability,and the Limits of Legitimation

This article extends the concept of regulatory capture to a prominent element of responses to the 2007–2008 global financial crisis overlooked in political science: the out-of-court settlements undertaken between regulators and financial firms. In outsourcing accountability to markets and diverging from previous crisis responses, these billion dollar agreements have remained highly controversial. How have financial regulators sought to legitimate this novel approach to post-crisis accountability? Contrasting material and cognitive conceptions of regulatory capture, I illustrate how American financial regulators have persistently prioritized market values in self-legitimating post-crisis financial accountability. Inconsistencies in the stress on transparency and growth, however, are shown to undermine the wider legitimation of this market-based approach. These limits underpin the scepticism with which post-crisis settlements have been received, as well as to the broader sense that accountability for the most severe period of volatility since the Great Depression has remained lacking.     

The power of policy networks in authoritarian regimes: Changing environmental policy in China

In this article, I examine how civil society organizations (CSOs) in China created policy networks among government officials to change environmental policies. I contend that these networks work in similar ways to those in democracies, despite the focus in the literature on how policymaking in authoritarian regimes lacks societal participation. China adopted strict regulations to control CSOs by requiring registration with a supervisory agency. However, CSOs exploit the regulations to use the supervisory agency as an access point to policymakers whom they otherwise could not reach. I use case studies to demonstrate how the strategies used to construct policy networks determined their success in changing policy. This finding represents an initial step in theorizing bottom‐up sources of policymaking in authoritarian regimes given that these regimes all create mechanisms for government control over CSOs, have difficulty accessing good information for policymaking from society, and a policy process formally closed to citizen participation.     

Capital united? Business unity in regulatory politics and the special place of finance

While organized business is a key actor in regulatory politics, its influence is often conditional on the level of unity or conflict occurring within the business community at any given time. Most contemporary regulatory policy interventions put pressure on the normal mechanisms of business unity, as they are highly targeted and sector‐specific. This raises the question of how business unity operates across a highly variegated economic terrain in which costs are asymmetric and free‐riding incentives are high. In this paper, we empirically assess patterns of business unity within regulatory policymaking across different regulated sectors. Our analysis utilizes data from hundreds of regulatory policy proposals and business community reactions to them in the telecommunications, energy, agriculture, pharmaceutical, and financial sectors over a variety of institutional contexts. We find considerable empirical support for the “finance capital unity” hypothesis – the notion that the financial sector enjoys more business unity than other regulated sectors of the economy. When the financial sector is faced with new regulations, business groups from other sectors frequently come to its aid.     

Community‐Based Participatory Research as a Tool for Policy Change: A Case Study of the Southern California Environmental Justice Collaborative

In 2000, a regional rule governing maximum individual cancer risk from stationary facilities in Southern California was dramatically altered, reducing allowable risk levels by 75%. This article uses a case study approach to explore the role of a community‐based participatory research (CBPR) partnership, the Southern California Environmental Justice Collaborative, in producing research and helping spearhead policy advocacy leading to this policy change. It also highlights the role of the collaborative in helping to change the framing of the issue from individual to cumulative risk assessment, so that the regulatory agencies began to reflect this broader thinking in their policymaking. The collaborative's structure and methodology, regional focus, relationships with key decision makers, and its reputation as an important source of both credible science and “people power” were seen as contributing to its effectiveness. The role of contextual factors including a recovering and more regulation‐friendly economy also is highlighted, as are key barriers faced. Implications for other community–academic partnerships working to address regional and statewide public policy are discussed.     

Taming the real estate boom in the EU: Pathways to macroprudential (in)action

In the fallout of the 2008 crisis, macroprudential policy has been installed as the policy remedy against future financial instability, a primary focus being developments in the real estate sector. With house prices consistently rising in the EU since 2014, causing alarm among macroprudential supervisory bodies, a core question of EU regulatory governance is how far macroprudential bodies have been capable of bringing about countercyclical actions against the build-up of such vulnerabilities. This paper investigates this question using a novel dataset of macroprudential intensity coded for the 17 EU countries that experienced real estate vulnerabilities post-euro crisis. Specifically, it asks which configuration of conditions account for the (in)capacity of countries to impose stringent countercyclical regulations against housing booms? Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis technics coupled with qualitative analysis of country cases using expert interviews, we find that the absence of political salience of homeownership and the political independence of macroprudential authorities to be crucial conditions that jointly explain countercyclical macroprudential activity. These findings, which show two pathways to action have implications for the capacity of the EU to prevent future crises and future reform of the EU prudential framework.     

From asset to patrimony: the re-emergence of the housing question

Abstract

The global financial crisis has ushered in a major housing crisis in many European countries. The paper seeks to shed light on why, despite massive housing crises, there are few policy efforts at tackling it. Probing into the policy paradigms that have informed housing policies, the paper demonstrates a shift towards housing as an asset before the crisis. Increasingly, housing policies have become interwoven with financial markets. This has led to a major policy mismatch after the crisis: while the return of the ‘housing question’ would have required renewed efforts at establishing housing as a social right, de facto policy makers sought to stabilise financial markets. The result is a paradoxical outcome, where neoliberal market-driven programmes are embedded in increased dependence on family wealth. The article demonstrates the shift from housing as asset to housing as patrimony in three different varieties of residential regimes, represented by Ireland, Denmark and Hungary.     

The IMF's Rethink of Global Banks: Critical in Theory,Orthodox in Practice

The International Monetary Fund's (IMF) new financial interconnectedness agenda, developed in response to postcrisis calls from G20 to better understand systemic financial institutions, deploys a critical approach that stresses the spatial, political, and institutional dimensions of cross‐border financial networks. It portrays global banks as key nodes in those networks, “super‐spreaders” of systemic risk through complex business models that involve yield search, regulatory and tax arbitrage. Yet this critical view does not translate into its policy advice at country level. In regular surveillance of developing countries, the IMF remains committed to a benign view of transnational banking, even when confronted with growing cross‐border fragilities. During crises of cross‐border banking, the IMF tailors its conditionality to minimize domestic regulatory challenges to cross‐border banking models and to propose crisis measures that create new profit opportunities for transnational banks.     

Financial industry mobilisation and securities markets regulation in Europe

The 2007–2009 financial crisis has led to considerable debate about the role of financial industry actors in global regulatory processes. This article seeks to contribute to this debate by assessing when and why financial industry actors mobilise in order to influence securities markets regulations. Do these mobilisation patterns suggest undue influence by a small set of powerful industry actors, or do they reflect the engagement of a more diverse set of actors representing broader public interests? It is argued that variation in mobilisation patterns is a function of: (1) institutional opportunity (the openness and accessibility of regulatory politics); and (2) demonstration effects (how crises increase the salience of regulatory issues). Empirical analyses suggest that the financial crisis diminished the diversity of mobilising actors. This trend, however, is reversed when the news media disseminate information about the costs of weak financial regulation and thereby increase the salience of regulatory issues.     

Political Parties and Representation of the Poor in the American States

Motivated by recent work suggesting that low‐income citizens are virtually ignored in the American policymaking process, this article asks whether a similar bias shapes the policy positions adopted by political parties much earlier in the policymaking process. While the normative hope is that parties serve as linkage institutions enhancing representation of those with fewer resources to organize, the resource‐dependent campaign environment in which parties operate provides incentives to appeal to citizens with the greatest resources. Using newly developed measures of state party positions, we examine whether low‐income preferences get incorporated in parties’ campaign appeals at this early stage in the policymaking process—finding little evidence that they do. This differential responsiveness was most pronounced for Democratic parties in states with greater income inequality; it was least evident for Republicans’ social policy platforms. We discuss the implications of these findings for representation in this era of growing economic inequality.     

Timing as a source of regulatory influence: A technical elite network analysis of global finance

Rules governing the international financial system are the subject of some of the most intense distributional battles waged in any area of global governance. Who wins and who loses such battles – and why? I develop a novel analytical framework – technical elite network (TEN) theory – which explains the widely varying levels of influence that stakeholders enjoy over global financial standards. TEN theory draws attention to how issue‐specific characteristics of international finance – in particular, its highly technical and complex nature – shape the distributional consequences of global regulatory processes. It posits that such characteristics influence distributional outcomes by (i) affecting who claims first‐mover position and, thus, sets the agenda in global financial rulemaking, and (ii) ensuring that proposals made by first movers are increasingly difficult to alter at later stages of rulemaking. I provide empirical evidence for the theory by examining two regulatory regimes that are central to the efficiency and stability of the global financial system: the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Accounting Standards Board.     

Unity and conflict: Explaining financial industry lobbying success in European Union public consultations

This article examines the contingent nature of financial industry lobbying power in the context of the policy formation stage of six European Commission regulatory proposals. I argue that lobbying success is a function of how well finance is able to speak with a unified voice. Building on existing studies, I examine industry unity as explicit preference alignment between actors but also in terms of actors abstaining from stating preferences. Staying silent on an issue sends signals to policymakers about issue saliency and industry support. Using a novel dataset derived from document coding and interviews, I examine the impact of industry unity on lobbying success in shaping six financial regulatory proposals in the context of the European Union. My findings show that lobbying success is partially contingent on the extent to which finance is united behind a common position. Critically, however, lobbying success is also related to the nature of that position, whether supporting the proposal or whether in favor of strengthening or weakening regulatory stringency.     

Crisis over,G20 struggles to prove its utility

It is four years since, in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, the Group of 20 (G20) was created as a key forum for global governance. But despite its initial promise as a useful means of marshalling a coordinated response to the crisis, cooperation among G20 governments has since become more difficult as they focus on domestic economic and political issues, and the body's effectiveness has declined.     

The Club Rules in Global Financial Governance

Though the list of reforms following the onset of the financial crisis is long, we should resist the temptation to view the emerging regulatory framework in terms of a paradigm shift. Many key features of the system, including the privileged position of financial institutions, remain unchanged. This is not merely due to obstruction or capacity shortcomings but can be explained by considering the sources of ideas and the governance setting. Ideas and policy programmes for reform were generated by a policy community also responsible for shaping the pre‐crisis governance framework. Moreover, the ideas and preferences of these players are moulded by their transnational interactions and the club‐like mechanisms in place for determining what (and who) is to be included in discussions. These settings have produced policy programmes that helped address the immediate, ‘fast‐burning’ elements of the crisis, but have so far failed to put together a comprehensive reform programme.     

Policy Diffusion: The Issue‐Definition Stage

We put forward a new approach to studying issue definition within the context of policy diffusion. Most studies of policy diffusion—which is the process by which policymaking in one government affects policymaking in other governments—have focused on policy adoptions. We shift the focus to an important but neglected aspect of this process: the issue‐definition stage. We use topic models to estimate how policies are framed during this stage and how these frames are predicted by prior policy adoptions. Focusing on smoking restriction in U.S. states, our analysis draws upon an original data set of over 52,000 paragraphs from newspapers covering 49 states between 1996 and 2013. We find that frames regarding the policy's concrete implications are predicted by prior adoptions in other states, whereas frames regarding its normative justifications are not. Our approach and findings open the way for a new perspective to studying policy diffusion in many different areas.     

Local feminist policy networks in the contemporary American interest group system

The emergence of local feminist policy networks is set within the context of the New Federalism of the Reagan-Bush administrations and the transformation of the U.S. interest group system over the past three decades. A case study of policymaking in a single urban setting focuses on changes in four policy areas of special interest to women: sexual assault, domestic violence, child care, and displaced homemakers. Single-issue feminist policy networks, composed of feminist advocacy groups, women-run services, local elected officials, and urban bureaucrats responsible for delivering, funding or regulating each policy, have formed around these issues. Each is characterized by: responsive policy changes; frequent interactions between local legislators, bureaucrats, and feminists; interlocking directorates; a symbiotic support system; diverse strategies and funding sources; and a federal-type organization. Local feminists have been incorporated in a new group universe embedded within a complex system of intergovernmental grants, contracts, and mandates. These networks help to sustain feminism and its public policy agenda through crises and challenges.     

Tracing policy influence of diffuse interests: the post-crisis consumer finance protection politics in the US

Dodd–Frank, the financial reform law passed in the United States in response to the 2008 financial crisis, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal regulator with the sole responsibility of protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. This decision marked the end of a highly politicized reform debate in the US Congress, in which proponents of the new bureau would normally have been considered to be much weaker than its opponents. Paradoxically, an emerging civil society coalition successfully lobbied decision-makers and countered industry attempts to prevent industry capture. What explains the fact that rather weak and peripheral actors prevailed over more resourceful and dominant actors? The goal of this study is to examine and challenge questions of regulatory capture by concentrated industry interests in the reform debates in response to the credit crisis which originated in the US in 2007. The analysis suggests that for weak actors to prevail in policy conflicts over established, resource-rich opponents, they must undertake broad coalition building among themselves and with influential elite allies outside and inside of Congress who share the same policy goals.