The Diffusion of Regulatory Reforms

Abstract

The past couple of decades have been a period of intense regulatory reform in Europe. Utilities have been liberalised and re-regulated, regulatory agencies have been established, and new practices such as regulatory impact analysis have been developed, just to name a few of the trends. As Majone has famously stated, we have witnessed the 'rise of the regulatory state'. Recently, the literature has increasingly insisted on the fact that the reforms carried out in the various countries have been interdependent. Taking up insights from several literatures such as those on policy transfer and policy convergence, and especially by the more recent diffusion literature in comparative and international political economy, scholars have argued that regulatory reforms carried out in one country affect the decision to enact reforms in other countries, or, conversely, that the decision to reform regulation in one country is affected by the reforms enacted in other countries. In other words, the point has been made that regulatory reforms have diffused across countries. While most researchers agree in principle that regulatory reforms can be subject to diffusion, the conceptualisation of these processes is still rudimentary, and empirical evidence is sparse. This panel seeks to advance the study of the diffusion of regulatory reforms by discussing the processes that make policies spread across countries. At the theoretical level, how can diffusion processes be conceptualised, and what are the mechanisms and channels that lead to the diffusion of regulatory reforms? At the methodological level, how can such diffusion processes be analysed, both qualitatively and quantitatively? At the empirical level, what is the evidence that regulatory reforms have been subject to diffusion? The panel is not focused on specific policies, and welcome papers that address the diffusion of regulatory reforms from a theoretical, methodological or empirical point of view.

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