From the ‘Responsible’ to the ‘Responsive’ Regulatory State? Citizen Engagement, Parliamentary Oversight and the Politicisation of Regulation

Since its inception in the 1980s and 1990s, the regulatory state has been characterised by the deliberate insulation of decision-making from politics and the electoral process. Such insulation would lead to policy outcomes that are better for the economy as well as for consumers. Yet, there has always been a tension between ‘responsibility’ and ‘responsiveness’ in regulation (cf. Mair 2009), and the regulatory state has been criticised for its technocratic nature and democratic deficit. This paper argues that the political and regulatory responses to the critique have contributed to a transformation of the regulatory state – from ‘responsible’ to ‘responsive’. Taking the British regulatory state as a ‘paradigmatic case’, and building on document analysis and interviews with political and regulatory actors, we consider three types of responses: (a) the politicisation of questions of ownership and regulation, (b) the increase in political oversight over regulatory agencies, and (c) the increase in regulatory engagement with citizens across different parts of the UK. We explore the causes of the transformation, focusing in particular on the role of identity politics and its scepticism towards technocratic expertise and the neoliberal ‘logic of discipline’ (Roberts 2010). Finally, we investigate the consequences of the transformation for the nature of the regulatory state, particularly in terms of questions of regulatory legitimacy.