Regulation in the Age of Governance

Regulation is no longer one of the defining features of American Exceptionalism. Nor is it only a feature of the European integration process in general and European public policy in particular. Instead, governance through rule-making and rule enforcement became one of the defining features of policy change across the world and at both the national, international and supranational levels. Indeed, the distinction between governance and regulation is narrowing as governments shed their responsibilities for direct service provision and shift more energies to regulating the service provision of other actors, as well as creating and sustaining new markets (a development that might best be labelled as regulatory capitalism, or alternatively captured by the notions of the rise of the regulatory state and of regulatory society). Our section aims to create another locus of disciplinary and interdisciplinary exchange in which political scientists who are specializing in public administration, public policy, political economy and international political economy can meet each other to discuss the new features of governance through regulation, their new challenges for maintaining public interest, and the existing varieties of the regulatory world. At the same time we aim to bridge between the institutional theory of governance and the literature of regulation. In doing so, we aim to bring in insights from studies of regulation from the social sciences at large and particularly from the sub-disciplines of Law and Society, Law and Economics.