In regulatory governance, the ‘Legitimacy Problem’ speaks to the ‘democratic deficit’ between Independent Regulatory Agencies (IRAs) tasked with making, monitoring, and enforcing rules for markets, and the autonomy that these bodies enjoy from the legislative arm of modern liberal democratic states. Today, the resolution of this legitimacy problem has become a pressing issue for the field given the dissatisfactory resolution to the 2008 Financial Crisis and the associated rise of a new politics of populism, ‘angrynomics’ and ‘anti-system politics’. Using critical logics analysis, the paper attempts to clarify the meaning and identity of regulatory governance, assess its potential to leverage the politics of the post-crisis era. It asks: what are the rules and norms of regulatory governance? What values, themes and activities are central and peripheral to the field? How does regulatory governance contest the status quo, attempt to destabilize, and leverage the institutional architecture of late capitalism? How does it lodge reasons for which the politics of the post-crisis era must change? How does it bring consistency to late capitalism, or how does it structure and represent the activities of private sector organizations? How does regulatory governance scholarship convince state actors to desire and engage with the strategies and trajectories of the field? Matching the answers to these social, political and fantasmatic logics against the themes and characteristics of ongoing austerity, agronomics and anti-system politics, the paper concludes that the democratic deficit, under which IRAs lack accountability to electoral majorities, is the symptom of a deeper failure of meaning, and hence legitimacy, within the field of regulatory governance. More than a simple quantifiable deficit between IRAs, legislators and publics, the legitimacy problem speaks to a field that contributes to the disqualification of economic alternatives; one that is well-served by the depoliticization of leftist representative politics; and that facilitates the disillusionment of citizens with the institutions and processes of liberal social democracy. As currently constituted, the field of regulatory governance has not only failed to leverage the institutional apparatus of late capitalism; but it would also seem to have encouraged and enabled, even facilitated, the symptoms of a world currently suffering through the politics of the post-crisis era. The paper concludes that if we are going to continue to accept the argument that regulation is the appropriate language in which to address the institutional apparatus of late capitalism, which we probably should; and therefore agree that regulation is a discipline around which intellectual communities should continue to gather, which it probably is, then we need to start coming to terms with suggestions that the field of regulatory governance needs to change in quite fundamental ways if it hopes to resolve its legitimacy problem and leverage the politics of the post crisis era.
