Reputation, Blame Avoidance and Regulatory Behaviour

Abstract

During the last decade, a number of studies have shown that regulatory agencies are not only politically responsive (as Principal-Agent theory would predict), but that their response to external demands is determined by reputational considerations (Carpenter 2001, 2010; Maor 2007, 2010). The more regulators perceive their autonomy and survival as a function of the perceptions and support of diverse audiences, the more attention they will devote to maintain and advance their manifold reputations (e.g., technical, moral, performative, procedural and so on). These agencies will take a close look at their audience structure and at processes affecting the values and attitudes held by their networked audiences. Regulatory behavior will be therefore limited by the politics of organizational reputation - cultivating organizational reputation, managing audience expectations and striking a balance between conflicting bases of reputation - in the same way it is restricted by budgetary and legal constraints. Scholars adhering to this standpoint aim to account for patterns of regulatory behavior with reference to organizational reputation and the “directive,” “gatekeeping” and “conceptual” regulatory power that it supports. The last decade saw also a theoretical development in roughly the same front. The concept of blame avoidance (Hood 2002, 2010) has entered the fray of regulatory politics in an attempt to account for patterns of regulatory behavior with reference to the desire to avoid blame for failure. This assertion was based on the assumption that blame avoidance is valued by regulators more highly than credit claiming (Weaver 1986). The insight generated so far comprises a set of strategies – “agency,” “presentational” and “policy” strategies – which are employed by regulators and politicians alike in pursuit of avoiding blame. This panel is open to novel theoretical and empirical contributions from all subfields of political science that try to advance our knowledge on the abovementioned theoretical streams.

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