Natural gas deregulatin: The need for further reform

Like attempts at achieving effective regulation of economic activity where it is warranted, deregulation can entail hidden complexities and produce unintended outcomes. The principle that deregulation begets “second order” effects that may necessitate further regulatory reform is epitomized in the case of natural gas. This article shows how the partial deregulation of natural gas wellhead markets under the Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978 caused a variety of distortions to emerge in other segments of the industry. Because the distortions are mutually reinforcing, no single policy, such as immediate decontrol of “old” gas or subjecting pipeline companies to common carrier obligations, will solve all of them; rather an integrated program of regulatory reform is required. The article concludes by outlining such a program and commenting on how its implementation through administrative and legislative actions should be carried out in order to reduce the need for further reform in the future.     

The redistribution of regulatory powers between governments and international organisations: the case of European airline deregulation

Abstract. This paper looks at the issues raised when deregulation is also accompanied with redistribution of the residual regulatory powers between governments and international organisations by focusing on the experience of deregulation of the airline industry in the European Community. The paper starts by applying a model of the political market for protection to the specific circumstances of the European airline industry in an effort to clarify the difficulties raised when redistribution of regulatory powers between different levels of government takes place. The findings of this analysis are then used to elucidate the European experience and in particular to explain the gap between the original proposals of the Commission and the final compromises worked out in the Council of Ministers.     

The limits of deregulation: Transnational interpenetration and policy change

Abstract. Deregulation became a major cross-national trend in the 1980s. Proponents of deregulation have included neoclassicists, pragmatists and certain analysts on the Left and Center-Left. Deregulation has a number of unintended or unforeseen consequences. A major issue is the development of new, market-oriented regulations and regulatory structures – the first category of 'reregulation'. Another is the cross-national knock-on effect of regulatory changes. And a third is the emergence of new forms of market stabilization and control, whether by the state or at the transnational level. A crucial feature of deregulation is the change in the wider pattern of state intervention from the 'welfare state' model to that of the 'competition state'. A number of competing explanations for deregulation can be identified – market explanations, institutional/technological explanations and political explanations – each of which has significant variants. These explanations can be seen to apply in the real world at four different levels: the 'global' level; that of various intermediary transnational political structures; the state level; and the level of 'self-regulation' of a neo-corporatist kind.     

Deregulation and Participation: An International Survey of Participation in Electricity Regulation

Amidst the wave of privatization and "deregulation" across the globe, a new set of regulatory structures is being created. The fact that deregulation actually involves "re-regulation" has been acknowledged in the recent literature, but the tension between regulation and public participation has been understudied in these new structures. While some private markets need effective regulation to reduce transactions costs and ensure stable market rules, consumers need regulation that is responsive to, and protective of, their interests. Consumer participation, therefore, is an important component of effective regulation. Effective regulation must also consider collective national or public interests, including the well-being of corporations. Therefore, regulatory agencies need to be both independent from, and responsive to corporate, consumer, and public interests. This article will briefly examine the tension among the competing goals of regulatory independence and responsiveness, and then conduct a broad survey of the status quo of public participation in national regulatory structures for electricity in the Americas. Our case studies demonstrate a wide variety of institutional mechanisms for participation, yet we find that no existing system seems to embrace direct participation by a wide set of consumers. The problems are even more acute in developing countries. We conclude by looking at recent experiments and proposals to improve the levels of participation in regulatory decision making.     

LONG TERM CARE REGULATION IN THE STATES: A SYSTEMIC PERSPECTIVE

In recent years there has been growing interest in differing state roles in the regulation of the health care industry. Most of this attention has stressed the impact of regulatory policy with only superficial attention directed towards understanding the extent to which states can be counted on to act effectively in the area of health care regulation. Using the regulation of nursing homes as a focus, this study evaluates a variety of sociocultural, political, and economic conditions for their impact on the development of various regulatory policies. The findings suggest that the development of certificate of need legislation and reimbursement controls were not related to significant changes ir, states' budgets for Medicaid services or in bed/population ratios. Instead, regulatory efforts were more closely linked to the sociopolitical environments surrounding the policy arena. While these factors provide some indication of the potential for strong state action in the regulatory arena, ultimately the use of state regulatory policies will depend quite centrally on the innovative tendencies of the state, its organizational capacity for addressing policy issues, and the nature and extent of interest group politics.     

Deregulation and the Racial Composition of Airlines

Economic theory suggests that the enhanced product market competition of deregulation reduces employers' ability to discriminate when hiring. Recent studies of the effect of deregulation on racial employment in the naturally competitive trucking industry find that deregulation increased minority employment. This study examines the effect of deregulation on racial employment in the airline industry. Because deregulation transformed airlines from wasteful service competition to rigorous price competition, deregulation's effect on racial hiring in this continuously competitive industry is not apparent. This study finds that deregulation only modestly changed the racial composition of major airline occupations, which suggests that the change in market structure as a result of deregulation may largely determine the effect of regulatory reform on the racial composition of an industry. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The effects of personal campaign financing on party defection: Evidence from Brazil

Scholars suggest that personalism in the electoral arena may reinforce legislators' autonomy from their political parties, increasing their chances of party defection. Our aim is to investigate the role of one fundamental factor that can strengthen personalism: the personal financial capacity to fund electoral campaigns. We seek to answer whether legislators who have more financial resources coming from either personal wealth or individual donations are more inclined to leave their parties during their terms. Through data from Brazilian federal deputies, we show using multivariate regression models that the share of personal resources (especially the share of resources coming from candidate's personal wealth) has positive effects on the chances of defection. Being part of the government coalition and the regulatory framework in place also influence the relationships at play.     

Politics, Economics and the Measurement of Power

To what extent is political power fundamentally different from or, alternatively, comparable to economic power? While it is true that the basic institutions of democratic political life - the electoral arena and the sovereign representative assembly - differ from such capitalist economic institutions as the market and the joint-stock company, the logic of the power game which takes place in both settings is quite similar. In both institutions power will be a function of the capacity to enter decisive coalitions with other players: individuals, political parties, stockholders or groups of stockholders. Power indices may therefore be employed in order to reveal aspects of the strategic gaming that takes place both in representative assemblies and at yearly stockholders' meetings. This article discusses and compares various quantitative measures of voting power in the two kinds of voting bodies.     

Second-order elections

Abstract The composition of the directly elected European Parliament does not precisely reflect the 'real' balance of political forces in the European Community. As long as the national political systems decide most of what there is to be decided politically, and everything really important, European elections are additional national second-order elections. They are determined more by the domestic political cleavages than by alternatives originating in the EC, but in a different way than if nine first-order national elections took place simultaneously. This is the case because European elections occur at different stages of the national political systems' respective 'electoral cycles'. Such a relationship between a second-order arena and the chief arena of a political system is not at all unusual. What is new here, is that one second-order political arena is related to nine different first-order arenas. A first analysis of European election results satisfactorily justifies the assumption mat European Parliament direct elections should be treated as nine simultaneous national second-order elections.     

AIR TRANSPORTATION POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION AT THE MILLENNIUM

This article examines air transportation policy and administration at the millennium. It reviews and analyzes major problem areas and focuses on issues that have to be dealt with to streamline the policy and administration in the field as it becomes more integrated in our increasingly intermodal transportation system. The first part of the article sets the stage for the changes experienced after deregulation: It utilizes an analytical model to examine: airports; airline industry management; terrorism and security; and safety, equipment and human resources. The second part of the article focuses more specifically on a policy and administration analysis itself. It demonstrates how we have evolved into a customer model more aligned with the market place, efficiency, and risk taking; while moving away from a safer and less entrepreneurial period identified as the citizen model period. With the canage of models, we find trust diminished. Passengers, customers and citizens, become more disenchanted and cynical, to the point of organizing through elected officials to promote an airline passenger bill of rights and reform the system.     

Complaining about rivals: Indifference,cooperation, and competition in the governance of advertising

What should rivals do when they see competitors breaking agreed rules within systems of self‐regulation? This study investigates compliant behavior among British advertisers to empirically answer this question. It analyses five years of complaints (n = 146,062) and adjudications (n = 4,832) published by the self‐regulatory body for the British advertising industry. The majority of firms adopt a strategy of indifference and rarely regulate their rivals. Highly engaged firms either adopt an angelic strategy as they use their resources to complain about their rivals; a deviant strategy as they are subject to a large number of complaints; or a predatory strategy as they attack their rivals through advertising regulation. This illustrates a unique form of regulatory capture in which a regulatory system becomes an arena of competition for some actors while continuing as a governance mechanism for others.     

Issue saliency,policy distances and coalition bargaining

This article addresses the problem of policy as a constraint for coalition bargaining. Two questions are posed: How fruitful are uni‐dimensional models for the analysis of coalition bargaining in multiparty systems? And how much do we gain by using a multidimensional approach? The questions are examined empirically by applying various sets of ten‐point issue scales. The Norwegian system is used as a case. The analysis indicates that a uni‐dimensional approach contributes notably to the understanding of coalition bargaining in the system. However, as the parties are divided along several traditional cleavages, considerable sophistication can be gained by adding more dimensions to the model.     

Deregulation redux: does mandating access to bottleneck facilities necessarily improve welfare?

We demonstrate that deregulation in the form of vertical separation of network components into natural monopoly and potentially competitive markets does not truly represent a lessening of regulatory burdens. That is, vertical separation is not synonymous with deregulation; “more competitors” is not equivalent to “more competition”. We assume a public interest regulator that is constrained to set a unit price that maximizes expected welfare subject to a break-even constraint. We show that under both symmetric and asymmetric information cases the information demands on the regulator of the vertically integrated system are no greater than those in the case of vertical separation.     

Bypassing a Centralized State: The Case of the Greek Subnational Mobilization in the European Union

For over 25 years successive administrative reforms have taken place in Greece, with a view to modernizing the subnational institutions. The European pressures come across as an influential factor inducing the process of change. But what has been the subnational responsiveness related to the rationalization initiatives? The aim of this paper is to investigate the Greek subnational authorities’ mobilization in the European arena, providing evidence of their bypassing the central state from a multi-level governance perspective. Building on the division between ‘financial' and ‘regulatory' mobilization, empirical data are drawn from the EU's environmental policy financial mechanism and the subnational representation and networking in Brussels. The figures show that only a few Greek subnational authorities financially mobilize; the vast majority show inertia. Moreover, their regulatory mobilization is hardly evident. It is argued that although the EU offers substantial incentives for mobilizing, domestic institutional capacity also accounts for much variation.     

CITIZEN GROUPS AND ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO REGULATORY REFORM

Berry examines alternative regulatory reform proposals which could lead to greater citizens group control over regulatory policy making. Citizens groups have been handicapped by problems of maintaining large-scale lobbying efforts, seeing little in the way of long-term rewards for accomplishing deregulation, being unwilling to play the Congressional logrolling game, and simultaneously favoring regulation in one area and deregulation in another. The costs and benefits to citizen group organizations are emphasized in considering the alternatives they advocate. Citizen participation programs are seen as the most likely to expand in the future.     

Four worlds of morality politics: the impact of institutional venues and party cleavages

The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular?religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introducing a second analytical dimension that captures the institutional venue (party politics vs. parliamentary politics), in which moral conflicts take place. This is useful because there are instances in which a religious cleavage is lacking, but moral conflicts are nonetheless highly intense and party-based (the traditionalist world), and there are cases in which the religious cleavage formally exists, but moral conflicts are nonetheless resolved in the parliamentary arena (the unsecular world).     

Exploring the formal and informal roles of regulatory intermediaries in transnational multistakeholder regulation

Research on regulation and regulatory processes has traditionally focused on two prominent roles: rulemaking and rule‐taking. Recently, the mediating role of third party actors, regulatory intermediaries, has started to be explored – notably in a dedicated special issue of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The present special issue extends this line of research by elaborating the distinction between formal and informal modes of regulatory intermediation, in the specific context of transnational multistakeholder regulation. In this introduction, we identify two key dimensions of intermediation (in)formalism: officialization and formalization. This allows us to develop a typology of intermediation in multistakeholder regulatory processes: formal, interpretive, alternative, and emergent. Leveraging examples from the papers in this special issue, we discuss how these four types of intermediation coexist and evolve over time. Finally, we elaborate on the implications of our typology for regulatory processes and outcomes.     

Preferences for Employment Protection and the Insider–Outsider Divide: Evidence from France

Insider–outsider theory argues that in dual labour markets there are two groups with opposing preferences regarding protection against dismissal: (i) insiders with permanent work contracts who defend employment protection, because it increases their rents, and (ii) outsiders (temporary workers and the unemployed) who see protection as barriers to mobility and demand deregulation. Although this argument is influential in the political economy literature, there is little empirical research on outsiders’ preferences regarding employment protection. This article tests the argument using French data on support for a proposed reform of employment protection. The results show that permanent and temporary workers do not differ significantly in their support for employment protection, while some evidence indicates that the unemployed do show greater support for deregulation. The article concludes that insider–outsider theory overemphasises the relevance of employment protection for temporary workers and that care should be taken not to place these workers in a composite outsider group with the unemployed.     

DEREGULATION: THE PRINCIPAL INCONCLUSIVE ARGUMENTS1

The authors suggest that most arguments in favor of deregulation are really double-edged swords which render the debate over deregulation inconclusive at best. They challenge the following positions as inconclusive: (1) that deregulation per se is good; (2) that it protects rights; (3) that deregulation removes uncertainties concerning the marketplace; (4) that it reduces “nitpicking” and coercive regulation; (5) that deregulation promotes greater productivity and efficiency; (6) that it combats inflation; (7) that regulations often cannot be justified by benefits over costs; and (8) there are serious problems of attaining optimum levels of regulation. Special interest groups in favor of deregulation are seen to bear a remarkable resemblance to groups opposed to deregulation.     

The importance of industry compliance in improving advertising self‐regulatory processes

As the most visible element of the marketing communications mix, advertising has had its critics and, given the choice, developed countries usually select a self‐regulatory approach to deal with unacceptable advertising. The recent breakdown of one of the world's longest established advertising self‐regulatory programmes in Australia has reopened the 20‐year old debate that has taken place in the leading academic and business journals concerned with enhancing understanding of such regulatory systems. This paper focuses on the activity of code enforcement in improving the effectiveness of advertising self‐regulatory frameworks. The key findings of an Australian study, where its scheme has recently failed, are presented and discussed in this context and a key concept is developed. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications