Limits of regulatory responsiveness: Democratic credentials of responsive regulation

Responsiveness and accountability constitute the process of democratic representation, reinforcing each other. Responsiveness asks elected representatives to adopt policies ex ante preferred by citizens, while accountability consists of the people's ex post sanctioning of the representatives based on policy outcomes. However, the regulatory literature tends to interpret responsiveness narrowly between a regulator and regulatees: the regulator is responsive to regulatees’ compliance without considering broader public needs and preferences. Democratic regulatory responsiveness requires that the regulator should be responsive to the people, not just regulatees. We address this theoretical gap by pointing out the perils of regulatory capture and advancing John Braithwaite's idea of tripartism as a remedy. We draw out two conditions of democratic regulatory responsiveness from Philip Selznick – comprehensiveness and proactiveness. We then propose overlapping networked responsiveness based on indirect reciprocity among various stakeholders. This mechanism is the key to connecting regulatory responsiveness with accountability.     

Understanding the Regulatory Thicket: Interactions Among State Environmental Regulators and Regulatees

Research exploring state-level regulatory interactions in the U.S. often employs survey methodology to ask front-line actors about their experiences. While these efforts are noteworthy, we argue that it is important to investigate these interactions utilizing a different approach. In this exploratory study, we use randomized vignettes, to which a respondent can react without fear of revealing practices or succumbing to social desirability. Our results are in concert with a growing body of literature that suggests cooperation between the regulator and regulatees is essential for future interactions in order to achieve compliance, yet each party’s perceptions may not be completely congruent.     

Trust Matters: Distrust in an External Evaluation of a Public Sector Program

This article draws upon autoethnographic data to explore distrust in an evaluation relationship from the perspective of an external evaluator. The study is based within a local-level evaluation of an economic regeneration program. The longitudinal nature of the study allowed for trust and the evaluation relationship to be examined with time and process present—a gap in previous evaluation studies. The exploration demonstrates various causes and symptoms of distrust within one evaluation. The article also reflects on the autoethnographic research approach adopted.     

Two Models of Monetary Redress: A Structural Analysis

Monetary redress is a developing area of human rights policy. The article examines how a redress program’s design affects the interests of program applicants. It distinguishes two program models, individual assessment and common experience, and explores their differing effects on applicants’ interests. Analyzing two Irish cases, redress for survivors of the industrial schools and the Magdalene laundries, the discussion is applicable to a wide range of redress programs including those in postconflict, transitional justice, and postcolonial contexts.     

Seal the Deal: Bargaining Positions,Institutional Design,and the Duration of Preferential Trade Negotiations

Multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organization have stalled. This has contributed to a steep rise in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). At the same time, negotiations for PTAs have not always proven quick and painless: While some treaties are sealed within a few months or days only, other agreements are preceded by protracted bargaining processes in trade and trade-related issue areas. In this article, we provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical variation. More specifically, we argue that PTA negotiations take longer the greater the distance between the prospective partners’ initial bargaining positions. Moreover, we contend that negotiation processes become more protracted the higher the relative ambition of the prospective PTA. Due to the limited links to the domestic political arena in autocracies, we expect this latter effect to play out for groups of democratic bargaining partners only. We test these two hypotheses for 198 preferential trade negotiations using novel measures for bargaining templates and the ambition of PTA clauses. In our two-stage survival models, we find support for our argument. In line with qualitative evidence from recent preferential trade initiatives, our models indicate that services, investment and intellectual property rights are particularly sticky agenda items for democratic leaders at the international bargaining table.     

Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism

“Spaces of self-consciousness” examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi's career.     

“Buying brains and experts”: British coal owners,regulatory capture and miners’ health, 1918 – 1946

This article examines British coal owners’ use of medical and scientific knowledge of occupational lung diseases in the mining industry to resist regulatory changes between 1918 and 1946. It explores the strategies deployed by coal owners in response to scientific and lay debates over the hazard to workers’ health presented by dust, and legislation to compensate miners for pneumoconiosis and silicosis contracted in the nation’s collieries. In particular, it investigates coal owner deployment of the views of notable scientists, especially the eminent physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860–1936), who insisted on the harmlessness of coal dust, in order to avoid costly compensation payments, as well as capital investment in ameliorative measures to reduce miners’ exposure to such hazards. In so doing, the article provides new insights by illustrating how coal owners influenced mining education programmes, deploying the arguments of Haldane and others, with direct implications for health and safety in British mines. This contributed to the mounting public health disaster wrought by coal dust on Britain’s mining communities. This process is viewed as part of the broader political activities of the coal owners – and their industry body, the Mining Association of Great Britain – in its attempts to influence the regulatory process in a period of dramatic change in the political economy of coal.     

The emergence of regulatory regionalism: transnational networks and the diffusion of regulatory agencies within regions

The regulatory regionalism approach has increasingly claimed that a new mode of regional governance is emerging globally. Regional policy regimes, developed in broad social and economic territorial areas, affect the internal transformation of the state. The authors plan to provide comprehensive empirical evidence about the emergence of worldwide regulatory regionalism by identifying how regulatory agencies have diffused very successfully within the regional level in recent decades. The paper aims to identify, using an original methodological design, the ways in which such diffusion of agencies occurred, as this may have theoretical relevance for the study of regulatory regionalism. The authors' hypothesis suggests that transnational political interactions in each regional cluster triggered agency diffusion, contributing to the development of the regulatory state within the countries of each region. To test this hypothesis, the authors employed a data set of regulatory agencies including the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), and most Asian and Latin American countries (+59) from 1950 to 2007, for 15 sectors related to finance, risks, utility and competition. Bayesian data analysis was used to estimate the parameters of interest.     

Lessons from International Multi-Option Referendum Experiences

Referendums are regularly criticised for reducing complex policy decisions to two maximally opposed options. This reduces opportunities for voter expression and can polarise debates. Alternative referendum designs which present more than two ballot options can offer innovative opportunities, but also raise new challenges. We can benefit by learning from previous experiences with multi-option referendum voting. Discussions of such experiences are rare and have often focussed on a limited number of cases. This article provides an overview of over 100 multi-option referendum experiences around the world. It discusses the topics on which they were held and the ballot options that were offered. It then analyses the variety in ballot design in terms of questions posed and voting methods applied. Drawing on the experiences of multi-option referendums, the article concludes with lessons that can be learned in relation to initiating and designing these referendums.     

The political economy of labor market deregulation during IMF interventions

This study examines the relationship between policy interventions by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and de jure labor rights. Combining two novel data sets with unprecedented country-year coverage – leximetric data on labor laws and disaggregated data on IMF conditionality – our analysis of up to 70 developing countries from 1980 to 2014 demonstrates that IMF-mandated labor market policy measures significantly reduce both individual and collective labor rights. Once we control for the effect of labor market policy measures, however, we find that collective labor rights increase in the wake of IMF programs. We argue that this result is explained by the impact of union pressure on governments which, in such a context, are imbued with the policy space to respond to domestic interest groups. The study has broader theoretical implications as to when international organizations are effective in constraining governments’ choices.