Our paper addresses the workshop’s question about the relationship between types of economic coordination and modes of regulation head on by testing the extent to which the organisation and strength of occupational health and safety (OHS) regulation is dependent on the dominant mode of coordination in the political economy. While the UK explicitly sanctions risk-cost-benefit trade-offs, other European countries mandate ambitious goals of safety. That contrast appears to reflect cleavages identified in the varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature, which suggests workers are better protected in co-ordinated- than in liberal-market economies. Our qualitative comparative policy analysis of Germany, France, the UK, and the Netherlands shows that the varied organisation of their regulatory regimes for work safety is indeed broadly consistent with VoC theory. Based on a large sample of expert interviews and detailed policy reviews, we are able to show that explicitness, rationalisations and logics of those trade-offs varies according to the coupling between risk regulation and the dominant mode of capitalist coordination of each country. However, despite their varied headline goals and regulatory design, we find no systematic differences in the strength of the countries regulatory protections insofar as all their regimes make trade-offs on safety. The lack of diversity in regulatory outcomes suggests that the institutional filtering of work safety trade-offs through different coordination models serves the function of ensuring normative compatibility with the dominant mode of coordination (e.g., cost-benefit analysis in LMEs versus coordination and negotiation of trade-offs in CMEs). Our paper evidences the high relevance of a so far rather neglected link between VoC and risk regulation. It wishes to inform a debate about whether and how regulation would need to be conceptualised and analysed as yet another institutional complementarity in capitalist coordination regimes, hoping to substantiate both analytically and empirically the discussion about regulatory capitalism.
