Perfect Strangers? A Study of International Cooperation on Regulatory Oversight

Regulatory oversight is increasingly becoming an institutionalized practice across the world that has nevertheless not received enough academic attention so far. Indeed, there is insufficient work on the determinants of international cooperation in regulatory oversight. This paper examines the evolution and the current status of cooperation among OECD countries in this sphere. In particular, it identifies actor characteristics that drive such exchanges and assesses whether perceptions of national innovativeness, functional requirements, and cultural identity shape cooperation through the use of institutionalist theories. To do so, it combines Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) with semi-structured interviews. Its findings suggest that cooperation among OECD countries is limited and restricted to a few arenas. In this scenario, commonalities in administrative traditions and political systems drive cooperation. For their part, innovative bodies tend to be popular actors. In contrast, regulatory oversight actors do not tend to exchange expertise with countries that have similar approaches to this set of procedures. These findings have broader implications for the literature on international cooperation; they hint that governmental actors unfamiliar with their foreign counterparts’ work may rely on country features that are not specific to their field as cues for international cooperation.