Legislators and bureaucrats as drivers of regulatory policy change: The case of energy storage technologies

Improvements in cost and performance of energy storage technology, specifically Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery technology, is a key element for the decarbonization of the electricity and transport sectors. While we know from innovation studies that market intervention through public policy is necessary to foster innovation in complex technologies (such as Li-ion batteries), systematic and comparative analyses of governance approaches on these technologies are lacking. Our understanding of how these public policies develop and change over time therefore is very limited – as is our knowledge about the drivers of such developments, particularly the agency of legislators and bureaucrats. This research gap is relevant to two increasingly interconnected literatures: In public policy literature, interest in policy design and the ‘designing’ of public policies (i.e. the processes and actors behind choices in the policy formulation phase) is growing. In regulation and governance literature, debates about the ‘regulatory state’, the role of (independent) regulatory agencies in policymaking processes, and learning in the context of (mulit-level) governance are ongoing. To address these issues, in this paper we aim to answer two questions: (1) How do regulatory policy mixes for fostering new technologies, specifically Li-ion battery technology, evolve over time?; (2) What are the roles of legislators and bureaucrats in shaping design choices? To answer these questions, we analyze a new dataset of 220 regulatory policies from the United States, California, Europe, and the United Kingdom, enacted between 2001 and 2019. The findings from our empirical analysis are relevant to research on climate and energy policy for two reasons: First, a better empirical and theoretical understanding of how the governance of emerging technologies evolves can inform strategies for increasing policy ambition over time, for example by making use of progressive-incremental policy change or through harnessing feedback effects. Second, our findings contribute to the broader question of accountability in policymaking. If key designs of regulatory policy mixes are determined by non-accountable regulators, this has implications for how democratic societies can react to pressing governance challenges such as climate change mitigation.