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.     

Prison labor markets: The supply issue

Putting prisoners to work has widespread appeal, but the nature of prison labor markets suggests that prisoners may have little incentive to work. The inmate population exhibits sociodemographic and psychological characteristics that correlate highly with labor market difficulties. Moreover, work incentives are bounded by both a guaranteed minimum standard of living and severe restrictions on the uses of earnings; prison is essentially a ration regime The impact of these institutional arrangements also depends upon the duration of the prisoner's remaining sentence and expected remaining lifetime. Unfortunately, there is little evidence bearing on these concerns, and experimental analysis is proposed.     

Safety through markets

His work on the economics of health, safety, and environmental risks includes Risk by Choice, Employment Hazards,and Learning About Risk(with Wesley A. Magat). His most recent book, Compensation Mechanisms for Job Risks(with Michael J. Moore) will be published by Princeton University Press in January, 1990.     

Democracy and Deceit: Regulating Appearances of Corruption

While corruption has long been recognized as an appropriate object of regulation, concern with appearances of corruption is of recent origin, coinciding with declining trust in government in the mid- to late-1960s. The reasoning that would support regulations of appearances, however, remains flawed, as it depends upon a "public trust" model of public service that is incomplete and often misplaced when applied to political representatives. The justification for regulating appearances is unambiguous, however, from the perspective of democratic theory. Democratic institutions of representation depend upon the integrity of appearances, not simply because they are an indication of whether political representatives are upholding their public trust, but because they provide the means through which citizens can judge whether, in particular instances, their trust is warranted. Representatives, institutions, and ethics that fail to support public confidence in appearances disempower citizens by denying them the means for inclusion in public judgments. These failures amount to a corruption of democratic processes.     

Regulating the deregulated

He has presented papers on traffic safety worldwide, published numerous articles, authored several books, and edited several more. His current project is a book on truck drivers and road safety.     

From Marketing Warfare to Warfare Marketing

ABSTRACT

THE PARADOXES OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY, 2nd Edition. Thomas E. Cronin and Michael A. Genovese. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 416 pp. Reviewed by Lawrence O. Hamer.     

Regulating Finance: Who Rules,Whose Rules?

This project has embedded in it an explanation of the structural and relational power transmission process stemming from “micro-actions” in global financial relations. This paper is about domestic policy adaptation in international and domestic finance and how it occurs. The fundamental contention of this paper is that the way to understand power in global finance is to provide an answer to the question: Who makes the rules in finance—state actors or nonstate actors? The answer to this question is problematic in the IPE literature because of both the enormous influence of finance in the councils of the industrial democracies and the information asymmetries that favor power in finance. Finance, it is argued, has the determining influence on the rules governing its industry. The dependent variable in this analysis is the policy output—the regulation and liberalization decisions of states. The behaviors of the state and of other policy actors in the policy process are the independent variables.     

Institutions come before markets

The Theory of Institutional Design. Edited by Robert E. Goodin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp.x + 288, name and subject indexes. £16.95 (paper); £35/$49.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–521–63643–4 and 47119–2.

The Political Economy of Public Administration. Institutional Choice in the Public Sector. By Murray J. Horn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp.ix + 263, biblio., name and subject indexes. £14.95/$21.95 (paper); £35/$59.95 (cloth) ISBN 0–521–48436–7 and 48201–1.

The Future of Governing : Four Emerging Models. By B. Guy Peters. Lawrence, KS: The University Press of Kansas, 1996. Pp.ix + 179, biblio., index. £11.95 (paper); £27.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–7006–0794–3 and 0793–5.

Public Management and Administrative Reform in Western Europe. Edited by Walter J. M.Kickert. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1997. Pp.xv + 278, 6 figures, 19 tables, biblio., index. £49.95 (cloth). ISBN 1–85898–553–6.     

Regulating abortion: Impact on patients and providers in Texas

The State of Texas began enforcement of the Woman's Right to Know (WRTK) Act on January 1, 2004. The law requires that all abortions at or after 16 weeks' gestation be performed in an ambulatory surgical center (ASC). In the month the law went into effect, not one of Texas's 54 nonhospital abortion providers met the requirements of a surgical center. The effect was immediate and dramatic. The number of abortions performed in Texas at or after 16 weeks' gestation dropped 88 percent, from 3,642 in 2003 to 446 in 2004, while the number of residents who left the state for a late abortion almost quadrupled. By 2006, abortions at or after 16 weeks' gestation in a nonhospital setting were available in four major cities in Texas (down from nine in 2003), and the abortion rate at or after 16 weeks' gestation remained 50 percent below its pre‐Act level. Regulation of abortion providers that require new facilities or costly renovations could have profound effects on the market for second‐trimester abortions. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Unintended consequences: Regulating the quality of subsidized day care

Advocates for the poor frequently support uniform, high federal standards for subsidized social services. While such standards may improve the quality of services for those who qualify, they can also have unintended but important side effects. Stringent regulations may actually curtail the supply of services, promote segregation, and expand the role of large subsidized for-profit firms. All these possibilities are illustrated by the history of federal regulation in subsidizing child day care. The federal government's retreat from regulation in 1980 and 1981 may have had results that—even if unintended—were in many ways salutary.     

Political Marketing

ABSTRACT

Political marketing is a relatively new approach to analysing political activity that draws upon management marketing assumptions to describe political behaviour. These assumptions are explicitly grounded in neoclassical economic assertions about behaviour. In political science these assumptions are utilised by orthodox rational choice theory. Thus, political marketing can be located within this perspective. Rational choice provides a series of analytic models through which ontological implications can be derived, and predictions made. Yet, the political marketing approach seeks to build upon orthodox rational choice accounts, by introducing a normative element to this perspective, prescribing the internalisation of these assumptions in order to achieve the desired objective. Further, this normative aspect claims that the adoption of marketing improves the democratic process. However, rational choice is an analytical ‘toolkit’ which does not seek to make normative claims. Indeed, normative arguments are inconsistent with rational choice, which seeks to provide a scientific, value-free approach to political analysis, and, consequently, the analytical and normative aspects of political marketing need to be rendered explicit and such normative aspects challenged.     

Political Marketing

Abstract

This paper examines the emerging practices and literature of what has been termed ‘political marketing.’ It attempts, through an investigation of underlying theoretical frameworks, to shed light on the impact and implications of this ‘new’ phenomenon. Specifically, it examines whether the above mentioned practices can rightfully be seen as transforming political parties into professional market-oriented organizations, as has been claimed in some recent academic studies. It does so by introducing and examining an increasingly strong-positioned marketing paradigm, services/relationship marketing. This paradigm's focus on the organizational perspective of marketing is discussed as is its applicability to analysis of politics and democracy. Furthermore the paper links this discussion to the wider concern over the ‘crisis in democracy’ resulting from a decline in civic engagement, decreasing voter turnouts and declining party-membership.     

Marketing ideas

There is a pressing need better to understand the relative merits of emerging ideas and their contexts of generation. However, it is important to point out that the enterprise is needlessly disadvantaged if we unthinkingly adopt certain implicit assumptions about the nature of ideas. This short paper aims to clarify the consequences of our reliance upon such assumptions. It sets out to do this by positing three broadly differing perspectives on the nature of ‘ideas’: 1) romantic, 2) modified romanticism and 3) constitutive. The relative merits of these perspectives are then considered through reflections on the practical experience of generating and communicating new ideas in social science research. The paper concludes that social scientists need to embrace a form of constitutive marketing of ideas.