2023 Award for Regulatory Studies Development: Congratulations to David Vogel

David Vogel is the winner of this year’s Regulatory Studies Development Award.

David is the Soloman Lee Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Business Ethics at Berkeley Haas and Professor Emeritus of Political Science. He has published extensively on both environmental management and government regulation.

Over decades David has made major contributions to regulatory studies. His path-breaking publications include National Styles of Regulation (1986), The Politics of Precaution (2012) and California Greenin’ (2018). In these books, and in many other academic outputs, David did not only manage to sketch out broad empirical patterns, but also analysed the historical provenance of regulatory regimes to extract the maximum analytical leverage from them.

To illustrate, David’s monograph National Styles of Regulation describes in great detail the history and development of environmental regulation in Britain and the United States. On basis of this description, he condensed two styles of regulation, deeply rooted in the political culture and societies of these distinct political systems. In doing so, David defies the common sense assumption that the stricter regime in the United States is more effective than the more lenient British regime. This book certainly laid the ground for a comprehensive research programme on regulatory styles.

A more recent example is David’s book The Politics of Precaution in which he compares risk-regulatory regimes in the European Union and the United States. He finds that the European Union and the United States changed their position here: While the United Stated often – up until the 1990s – had adopted stricter standards than policy makers in the European Union, EU standards are nowadays often more ambitious than those across the Atlantic. In his insightful and detailed comparison David not only identifies key drivers of this change, but also explores the causal mechanism through which the EU exports its standards globally.

These are only two examples of how David Vogel contributed to the development of the field and prepared the ground for research programmes in regulatory governance.