What “Regulatory State”? Explaining the Stability of Public Spending and Redistribution Functions after Regulatory Reforms of Electricity and Rail Services in the United Kingdom and Germany

In Europe, the rise of the regulatory state was accompanied by a broad diffusion of research on the processes of privatisation, liberalisation, and reregulation of utilities, previously managed directly by the state. This article offers an empirical and theoretical discussion of the paradigm of the regulatory state. It proposes to evaluate the transformation of the actual functions of the welfare state in a context of reforms of network industries over the last twenty years. Relying on cases from the electricity and railways sectors, it studies the changing balance between the traditional functions of the welfare state and the new regulatory functions introduced by the reforms. This article explains how, alongside the strengthening of regulatory functions, states maintained and developed powerful redistribution functions. The emerging regulatory state is not substituted for the positive/welfare state, but partly juxtaposed with it, making the structures for governing these sectors much less easy to read.     

Filing for corruption: Transparency, openness and record-keeping

The rhetoric of the new development agenda is shaped by democratisation,decentralisation and accountability. The intention is to reassert the role ofthe state but only within the context of involving and working for thepeople. Multilateral and bilateral donor statements are replete withreferences to openness, transparency, accountability and combatingcorruption. This article discusses the rhetoric of such language but then askshow they are to be implemented.What is at issue is that such terms are crucial development goals but,without greater attention to concrete outcomes and processes, may remainrhetoric.     

FAMILY COURT IMPROVEMENT AND THE ART OF GRANTSMANSHIP: A JUDGE'S PERSPECTIVE

Many American courts face funding obstacles as they try to create and implement unified family court processes that have not been part of the traditional family court adversarial process. To create new staff positions, build and equip adequate facilities, and create and implement innovative programs, grant funding may be available to supplement what local and state governments provide. While social science research confirms that children are adversely affected by exposure to high‐conflict family litigation and domestic violence, many communities have few affordable and available resources to address these issues. This article presents lessons and principles that one court learned as it applied for a grant to design programs for high‐conflict families and families with domestic violence history.     

A Reasonable Balance of Law and Sentiment: Social Order in Democratic Taiwan from the Policeman's Point of View

Taiwan's political democratization has engendered a contradiction in its legal regime: consolidation of rule of law at the macro-institutional level is matched by the persistent marginalization of legal authority in ground-level social practices. This article uses an ethnographic study of neighborhood police to explore certain practical and structural elements involved in maintaining this contradictory sociopolitical order. I examine some of the processes through which state authority is invoked and applied to the policing of public space, focusing on the ideals of legitimacy that animate these processes. The argument of the article is that historical and cultural factors embodied in contemporary Taiwan's "idea of police"—exemplified in the trope of a balance between reason, law, and sentiment—are crucial to understanding how solidification of the rule of law within state institutions is kept within the boundaries of a social sensibility that does not take law as the last word.     

Earth system governance: a research framework

The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop “strategies for Earth System management”. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient—they are also poorly understood. This article presents the science programme of the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research effort endorsed by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). It outlines the concept of earth system governance as a challenge for the social sciences, and it elaborates on the interlinked analytical problems and research questions of earth system governance as an object of study. These analytical problems concern the overall architecture of earth system governance, agency beyond the state and of the state, the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes as well as their accountability and legitimacy, and modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. The article also outlines four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem as well as for the integrated understanding of earth system governance: the role of power, knowledge, norms and scale.     

Legitimate Force in a Particularistic Democracy: Street Police and Outlaw Legislators in the Republic of China on Taiwan

This article explores a “particularistic” concept of legitimacy important to Taiwanese democracy. This form of legitimacy, I suggest, has been instrumental for Taiwan's successful democratic consolidation in the absence of the rule of law. As evidence, I combine ethnographic observation of neighborhood police work with historical consideration of a type of political figure emergent in the process of democratic reform, which I call the “outlaw legislator.” I focus my analysis on the institutional and ideological processes articulating local policing into the wider political field. The center of these processes is a mode of popular representation that positions the outlaw legislator as a crucial hinge articulating the particularistic local order with central state powers. By analyzing the cultural content of the dramaturgical work used to reconcile low policing with higher‐level state operations, this article shows how a particularistic idiom of legitimacy helps hold Taiwanese democracy together.     

Experimental Governance: The Open Method of Coordination

Abstract:  The open method of coordination (OMC) has increased the competence of the European Union to regulate areas where the traditional Community legislative processes are weak, or where new areas require coordination of Member State policy, either as part of the spillover of the integration project as a result of economic and monetary union, or as a result of the case law of the European Court of Justice. The OMC is viewed as an aspect of new, experimental governance, which is part of the response by the EU to regulatory shortcomings. This article explores the normative aspects of the OMC using case studies. The article examines the conditions in which the OMC emerges, the conditions upon which it thrives, and the claims that are made for its effectiveness as a new form of governance.     

Real Estate Markets Are Informationally Efficient: Evidence from Buyer and Agent/Broker Surveys

This article presents new evidence based on unpublished buyer surveys and real estate agent and broker surveys supporting the consensus in the published literature that real estate markets are informationally efficient. This evidence is drawn from expert reports submitted in litigation involving claims that contamination caused property value diminution, and presents a new hedonic regression model of residential sales prices that includes as an independent variable the state of knowledge of the buyer regarding a contamination event. In this model the state of knowledge of the buyer has no statistically significant effect on the sales price. The article also discusses standards for the use of buyer and agent/broker surveys in litigation.     

Institutional Recalibration and Judicial Delimitation

Throughout American history, a peculiar and recurrent disjunction has often arisen between the substance of transformative reforms and the decidedly less‐radical governing arrangements that arise in the aftermath of reform. To account for this disjunction, this article puts forth a theory of postreform “recalibration.” Political processes of recalibration are the means by which vague, indeterminate principles of reform are given operational meaning and translated into new governing arrangements. This article illuminates recalibration processes by examining two case‐studies: African American rights in the post‐Reconstruction era of the 1870s and 1880s, and labor rights in the post–New Deal era of the late 1930s. Finally, the article also highlights the crucial role of the Supreme Court in recalibration processes and sets forth a theory of judicial behavior as driven by an institutional interest in stability.     

The Logics of Supranational Human Rights Litigation,Official Acknowledgment,and Human Rights Reform: The Southeast Turkey Cases before the European Court of Human Rights, 1996–2006

This article examines the domestic impact of supranational human rights litigation on acknowledgment of state violence in the context of macroprocesses of global governance. The article's argument is that the impact of supranational human rights litigation on the process of acknowledgment must be seen through counternarratives on state violence. The article undertakes a detailed textual analysis of the truth claims and denial strategies that emerged from the European Court of Human Rights proceedings on state violence during Turkey's struggle against the armed group the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). It assesses these in the context of the human rights reforms that were created following pressure from European-level governance processes. The article argues that attention must be paid to agency in acknowledgment and truth-telling processes, and points to the limits of technical-bureaucratic forms of human rights reform interventions in the context of state violence.     

The states "race" with the federal government for stem cell research

This article presents an innovative study of the effect of individual states and private institutes in pushing forward stem cell research despite a federal ban on creating new stem cell lines. The author analyzes the impact of state legislation, proposing that states are reacting to federal policy by serving as laboratories for what is traditionally federally funded biomedical research.     

Reclaiming the Power to Punish: Legislating and Administrating the California Supermax, 1982–1989

This article examines how increasingly punitive prison conditions, epitomized by the birth and spread of the supermax prison, developed in the United States. This analysis builds on a growing literature about the “new punitiveness” of U.S. punishment policy and its global proliferation. This article shifts the focus away from the policies that have led to increasing rates of incarceration, however, and toward the policies that have shaped the conditions of incarceration. Drawing on archival research and more than 30 oral history interviews with key informants, I examine the administrative and legislative processes that underwrote the supermax innovation in California in the 1980s. During California's late twentieth‐century prison‐building spree, prison administrators deployed multiple rhetorics of risk to extend their control over conditions of confinement in state prisons. As the state invested billions of dollars in prison building initiatives, legislators, who were focused primarily on building prisons faster, ceded authority over prison design and conditions to prison administrators. In the end, rather than implementing legislative policy, prison administrators initiated their own policies, institutionalizing a new form of “supermax” confinement, pushing at the limits of constitutionally acceptable practices.     

The Inside View: Using the Enron E‐mail Archive to Understand Corporate Political Attention

For decades, scholars have debated the role of corporations in American politics. To date, they have relied on either interviews or publicly disclosed spending and lobbying reports. This article presents new methods and data that enable us to consider the internal processes of corporate political attention instead. Aided by automated content analysis, this article uses more than 250,000 internal e‐mails from Enron to observe its political attention between 1999 and 2002. These e‐mails depict Enron's employees as focused on monitoring and formally participating in political processes, including bureaucratic processes. Only a small fraction of their political attention focused on elections.     

Legalizing education: the role of law in the regulation and deregulation of China's private education

This article explores the role of law in shaping the growth of private education, as a part of educational reforms in response to social change in the People's Republic of China (PRC) after the 1980s. This paper argues that law acts as a new social game rule, one used by the state to govern, regulate and promote new relations and interactions between state and non-state players in educational reform and to rectify irregularities generated by the players. The process of legislation reveals the tension between regulation and deregulation of the relationship between private educational institutions and government. This paper concludes by offering an understanding on the role of law as both a means and an end in shaping educational reform in the face of ongoing social changes.     

The CBD at ten: The long road to effectiveness

Abstract

This article reviews progress and challenges in the implementation of the Convention on biological diversity since its adoption in 1992. Progress has been significant in many ways, although difficult to measure beyond procedural improvements (creation of new institutions, guidelines, national processes) and the development of new tools. Many challenges remain, both at the level of the operation of the regime and of national implementation, in part due to the nature of the convention and the complexity of its relationships with other regimes. Since knowledge about the state of biodiversity is scant and indicators poor, the argument is advanced that we should assess CBD's success and effectiveness by its ability to promote several of the preconditions of regime effectiveness. Accordingly, this article considers the record of the CBD in terms of learning, capacity‐building, network building, transparency, and the elaboration and diffusion of new norms.     

Human Rights Law: Australia and Slovenia

The human rights legal framework of Australia and Slovenia are vastly different. This article explores the evolution of human rights laws of Slovenia and Australia. While the study and comparison of Australia and Slovenia is uncommon, and not often used as an example to highlight aspects of human rights, both states have a long history of cooperation. The first Slovenian reportedly arrived in Australian in 1855. Since then, and particularly following World War Two, there has been a steady stream of Slovenian’s migrating to Australia. Slovenia upon independence prepared a new constitution that reflected the democratic human rights of the European Union, in 1991, and ratified the European Convention on Human rights in 1994. This article highlights how the opportunity Slovenia had to develop a new constitution, they were able to include many human rights that are often found in legislation. Australia’s constitution came into effect in 1901. Being more than 100 years old, there has been no attempts to revise the Australian constitution and expand the current express human rights. This article will determine whether the European Union’s human rights laws have not only influenced Slovenia’s human rights laws, but also Australia’s. This article suggests that Australia has much to learn from the Slovene experience, but is constrained by its constitution and region. This article highlights how a state formed in recent times, has had the opportunity to develop a constitution that reflects modern day human rights while an older state with longer established democracy has fallen behind in its protection of human rights.     

Architects of the State: International Financial Institutions and the Reconstruction of States in East Asia

For international financial institutions (IFIs), it is a continuing puzzle why the global norms they propagate are enacted either reluctantly or not at all. This article shows that failures of enactment and implementation frequently occur because many IFI‐initiated law reforms go far beyond changing the law; they amount to a restructuring of the state itself and the accompanying redistributions of power. This article demonstrates how state restructuring can occur in a technical area of commercial law by reanalyzing the ways global and transnational designs of corporate bankruptcy regimes fared between 1998 and 2006 in three countries variously affected by the Asian financial crisis: China, Indonesia, and South Korea. State restructuring occurred by (1) shifting the boundary between the market and state, (2) shifting power inside the state, and (3) vesting new powers in the state. The article identifies the recursive dynamics through which the changes unfolded and shows how variations in the efficacy of international architects of the state can be attributed to the interplay of four sets of factors: the coherence of global norms, the relative power of global versus state actors, domestic demand and mobilization for restructuring, and the extent of state restructuring that reforms will induce.     

Committees and Legislative Strengthening: The Growing Influence of Committees in Ukraine's Legislative Process

The Ukrainian legislature is in the process of transforming from a ‘rubber stamp’ institution of the Soviet type into an ‘institution that matters’ in a new democratic state. The practice of democratic institution building in the post-Soviet countries presents multiple examples of powerful executives who gained dominance in legislative processes. What path has Ukraine taken and what can explain its specific characteristics? This article charts the growth of committees here as a marker of legislative institutionalisation in Ukraine. The study finds that Ukrainian legislative committees defy prevalent regional trends and, contrary to expectations, have asserted independent roles. It then discusses factors that may account for this unique regional development – the role of a dual executive structure and the Ukraine party system.     

A temporal analytical approach to decentralization: lessons from Brazil's health sector

This article introduces a new concept to the study of decentralization processes: policy dynamism. At its core is the notion that the sequential and temporal process of health decentralization affect the nature of intergovernmental relationships and municipal bureaucratic capacity. Examining the case of Brazil, I argue that the rush to decentralize health services to municipalities has, in the absence of sufficient financial and technical assistance from the federal and state governments, increased state-municipal conflict over the management of health policy, limiting municipalities' ability to increase bureaucratic capacity. Consequently, some states have attempted to recentralize reforms, generating further conflict between both subnational levels of government. While some municipalities have tried to overcome these problems by creating associations and working with international organizations, several bureaucratic obstacles remain. This article attributes these outcomes not to federal institutions and economic constraints (the traditional approach in the literature) but rather to the noninstitutional, temporal policy dynamics of decentralization.     

Territorializing Regulation: A Case Study of "Social Housing" in England

This article shows that the legislative creation of new regulatory regimes can be approached as a process that carves out new territories of governance. Specifically, using the theoretical framework of social space, it explores the formation of a regulatory community arising out of the United Kingdom's Housing Act 1974, a community made up of the regulatees—not-for-profit housing associations—and the state regulator. The article demonstrates that the process of carving out a new territory of governance and the "spatial practices" of the occupiers of this new territory both enable the community to establish a large element of control of the regulatory regime. This analysis challenges an understanding of law as top-down, substituting a more nuanced, three-dimensional understanding of the production of norms and "common sense." Regulatees are not just subject to regulation but shape the space through their expertise and social relations.