Regulatory Governance and the Representation of Diffuse Interests

Abstract

The integration of private actors into regulatory decision-making has become a phenomenon of eminent importance. International regulatory authorities increasingly rely on private expertise for formulating rules that are binding on economic, social and political actors. An important reason for this process is the limited capacity of public authorities to master the technical knowledge that is necessary for ever more ambitious regulatory tasks. Although the integration of private actors promises to combine governmental and non-governmental problem-solving capacities, the literature also highlights a number of risks. One of these risks is that forms of de facto private governance might emerge which are insensitive to asymmetries in the representation of interests and which exclude, intentionally or not, legitimate but weakly organized (diffuse) interests. The papers in this panel respond to such concerns by addressing some or all of the following questions: 1. what kind of issues are delegated to private governance arenas? Is it merely regulatory decision-making with pareto-optimal outcomes or do we observe decision-making competences with redistributive or otherwise politically sensitive implications? 2. How relevant is the problem of asymmetrical interest representation in the view of both relevant public authorities (i.e. those who delegate tasks or refer to the output of forms of private governance) and non-governmental participants? 3. What procedural rules are established in different policy arenas for re-balancing the representation of diffuse and non-diffuse interests? In which arenas do we observe such rules at all? 4. Can we observe any significant difference in terms of output between private govern-ance arenas which support the integration of diffuse interests, and those which do not?

Title	Details
Regulatory governance and the representation of diffuse interests: a research agenda	View Paper Details
Diffuse Interests in International Environmental Regulation	View Paper Details
How Decision-Making Procedures Create Good Governance: Technical Regulation in the European Union	View Paper Details
The Perspective Nature of Semi-Private Transnational Rulemaking: Evidence from Internet Governance	View Paper Details
The Representation of Social Constituencies in the Governance of International Accounting Standards	View Paper Details
[TABLED PAPER] Representation of public interest in standardization	View Paper Details
[TABLED PAPER] Understanding American State Attorney General and Multi-State Consumer Protection Litigation, 1989-2004	View Paper Details