The gradual transformation? The incremental dynamics of macroprudential regulation

This article focuses on the transformatory potential of macroprudential ideas following the financial crash of 2008, examining how they are being mediated by existing institutional contexts and how and why the task of building a new body of technical macroprudential knowledge is proceeding slowly. It is argued that the movement toward a form of macroprudential regulation has a distinctly incremental dynamic that means any macroprudential transformation will be a gradual process that is likely to span a decade or more. Using Peter Hall's framework of three orders of policy change across substantive and temporal dimensions, the article argues that the macroprudential ideational shift can be compared to third order change. In this sense, it was intellectually radical and took place rapidly in a period of around six months. However, intellectual radicalism does not automatically translate into a radical change in regulatory practice, because of a variety of countervailing political, institutional, and informational variables. In this respect, the task of developing first and second order macroprudential policy is proving to be a much more politically contested process. Furthermore, macroprudential policy is being developed by cautious technocrats who rely on the gradual accumulation of data and evidence to justify policy. The result is a distinctly incremental dynamic to macroprudential policy development that displays many of the features of a process that historical institutionalists refer to as “layering.”     

Judging politicians: The role of political attentiveness in shaping how people evaluate the ethical behaviour of their leaders

Political theorists have developed well‐defined normative understandings of what constitutes ethical political conduct. Based on democratic theory as well as the demands of practical politics, these understandings prescribe certain types of behaviour and proscribe other types. However, it is unclear to what extent this normative framework has resonance for ordinary citizens. This article demonstrates that attention to politics tends to increase the resonance of this normative framework. The analysis identifies three norms about the holding of public office that are expected to structure citizens' ethical judgments: the avoidance of conflicts of interest; conformity with the law or institutional rules; and the maximisation of the public good. The article assesses the importance of these norms in structuring judgments by means of an experiment embedded in a population survey conducted in Great Britain. The analysis finds that informational cues pertaining to conflict‐of‐interest avoidance only condition responses among the attentive, while information pertaining to law conformity has far wider resonance. This finding has implications for approaches to political ethics focusing on normative considerations that appear to have low salience for much of the general public.     

National Institutions and the Globalized Political Economy of Technological Change: An Introduction

In the last three decades research across the social sciences has made great advances in the political economy of technological change. Nonetheless, many of these insights are solely tied to national, sometimes regional, explanations of industrial R&D and innovation rates. Meanwhile, the impacts of the international system, and of the actions of individual countries, on technological changes across many countries, are increasingly more pronounced. It is therefore imperative that we expand our theoretical conceptualizations. For these reasons we have gathered, in this special issue, economists, political scientists, geographers, and sociologists to explore in a comparative way what we view as some of the critical areas for research at two different level of analysis—business and nations. This introduction will outline their major research themes and provide a brief history of the debate.     

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.     

Fiscal consolidation under electoral risk

The European debt crisis has uncovered serious tension between democratic politics and market pressure in contemporary democracies. This tension arises when governments implement unpopular fiscal consolidation packages in order to raise their macroeconomic credibility among financial investors. Nonetheless, the dominant view in current research is that governments should not find it difficult to balance demands from voters and investors because the economic and political costs of fiscal consolidations are low. This would leave governments with sufficient room to promote fiscal consolidation according to their ideological agenda. This article re‐examines this proposition by studying how the risk of governments to be replaced in office affects the probability and timing of fiscal consolidation policies. The results show that governments associate significant electoral risk with consolidations because electorally vulnerable governments strategically avoid consolidations towards the end of the legislative term in order to minimise electoral punishment. Specifically, the predicted probability of consolidation decreases from 40 per cent after an election to 13 per cent towards the end of the term when the government's margin of victory is small. When the electoral margin is large, the probability of consolidation is roughly stable at around 35 per cent. Electoral concerns are the most important political determinant of consolidations, leaving only a minor role for ideological concerns. Governments, hence, find it more difficult to reconcile political and economic pressures on fiscal policy than previous, influential research implies. The results suggest that existing studies under‐estimate the electoral risk associated with consolidations because they ignore the strategic behaviour that is established in this analysis.     

Understanding UKIP: Identity,Social Change and the Left Behind

In this article we explore the structural shifts which help explain the emergence of UKIP as a major radical‐right political force in Britain. There are two distinct, but related, aspects to this story. The first is the changes to Britain's economic and social structure that have pushed to the margins a class of voters who we describe as the ‘left behind’: older, working‐class, white voters with few educational qualifications. The second is long‐term generational changes in the values that guide British society and shape the outlook of voters. These value shifts have also left older white working‐class voters behind, as a worldview which was once seen as mainstream has become regarded as parochial and intolerant by the younger, university‐educated, more socially liberal elites who define the political consensus of twenty‐first‐century Britain. We then move to consider the political changes that have further marginalised these voters, as first Labour and then the Conservatives focused their energies on recruiting and retaining support from middle‐class, moderate swing voters. Finally, we show how UKIP has developed into an effective electoral machine which looks to win and retain the loyalties of these voters. Finally, we discuss the longer‐term implications of the radical‐right revolt, which has the potential to change the nature of party competition in Britain in the 2015 election and beyond.     

“外资有限并购论”与民族经济的保护

在跨国并购大潮下,民族经济面临生存危机,保护民族经济问题日显突出。本在重新界定“民族经济”概念和分析我国民族经济面临风险的基础上,着重提出“外资有限并购论”以及切实可行的保护措施。     

Is regulatory innovation fit for purpose? A case study of adaptive regulation for advanced biotherapeutics

The need to better balance the promotion of scientific and technological innovation with risk management for consumer protection has inspired several recent reforms attempting to make regulations more flexible and adaptive. The pharmaceutical sector has a long, established regulatory tradition, as well as a long history of controversies around how to balance incentives for needed therapeutic innovations and protecting patient safety. The emergence of disruptive biotechnologies has provided the occasion for regulatory innovation in this sector. This article investigates the regulation of advanced biotherapeutics in the European Union and shows that it presents several defining features of an adaptive regulation regime, notably institutionalized processes of planned adaptation that allow regulators to gather, generate, and mobilize new scientific and risk evidence about innovative products. However, our in-depth case analysis highlights that more attention needs to be paid to the consequences of the introduction of adaptive regulations, especially for critical stakeholders involved in this new regulatory ecosystem, the capacity and resource requirements placed on them to adapt, and the new tradeoffs they face. In addition, our analysis highlights a deficit in how we currently evaluate the performance and public value proposition of adaptive regulations vis-à-vis their stated goals and objectives.     

Who opposes labor regulation? Explaining variation in employers’ opinions

Competing accounts of the effect of globalization on labor politics agree that firms influence regulations, but make contrasting predictions for which firms are most likely to oppose regulations. Using survey data from employers in 19,000 manufacturing firms in 82 developing countries, we examine the determinants of employers’ opinions toward labor regulation. In contrast to the predictions of optimistic theories of globalization, we find that (i) firms that export are more likely to have negative opinions toward labor regulation than those that sell domestically, and (ii) firms that receive foreign direct investment have similar views as firms that rely only on domestic capital. Further, we show that systematic differences in employers’ opinions depend on the intensity of the competitive pressures they face and their use of skilled workers. In doing so, we provide an empirically grounded account of the heterogeneous opinions of key actors in economic policymaking in developing countries.     

The Political Quarterly, 2009 Lecture: Doing Politics Differently

A discussion of how politics is done in Britain, and how it could be done differently. It explores the relationship between culture and structure in politics, and between strong government and effective accountability. The argument is that the concentration on structures can lead to a neglect of the importance of political culture. It suggests that there are three democratic levels, and that Britain does better on one than on the others; and identifies a range of democratic issues to be tackled. It concludes by suggesting that even without major instrumental changes there are cultural changes that would make a difference to how politics is done in Britain.