2012 Giandomenico Majone Prize

From the Standing Group on Regulatory Governance.

The 2012 Giandomenico Majone Prize was awarded to Kristian Krieger during the 4th Biennial Standing Group Conference in Exeter, United Kingdom.

The Award Committee was composed of Koen Verhoest, Colin Scott, Annetje Ottow and Martino Maggetti. It is balanced in terms of members coming from different disciplines (law, political science, public administration), being at different career stages, and gender.

The Award Committee received 17 submissions and scored all papers on the following criteria: originality, relationship to the literature, methodology and theory (conceptualization, measurement and analysis), soundness of the results, implications for future research, practice or society, quality of communication. Six of the 17 papers submitted were of a very strong quality and three were outstanding. The selection of the Award winner was therefore not an easy task.

Kristian Krieger's award-winning paper studies "Norms, Structures, Procedures and Variety in Risk-Based Governance: the Case of Flood Management in Germany and England". The paper scores best overall on the criteria mentioned above. Krieger challenges the assumption that risk-based governance is universally and uniformly applied in developed countries by comparing contemporary flood management in Germany and England. Drawing on in-depth empirical research, this paper shows that the role, influence and even definition of 'risk' is shaped within the institutional environments of German and English flood management. In particular, the use and conceptualisations of risk in governance are promoted, filtered or constrained by administrative structures, norms, and political and cultural expectations in each country.

However, although Krieger's paper was strongest in all respects, we want to pay tribute to two other papers which were shortlisted for the Majone Prize. We want to give them an honourable mention because they both make important contributions to our field.

The first is by Murray Petrie, a Senior Associate at the Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, entitled "Jurisdictional Integration: a Framework for Measuring and Predicting the Depth of International Regulatory Cooperation in Competition Policy". The paper is very original and strong in its development of new ways to measure international regulatory cooperation, such it can be replicated in sectors other than competition policy. Using a database of 92 agreements the author shows the applicability of the measurement for describing and explaining the depth of international regulatory cooperation or to use this measurement as an explanatory factor.

The second paper is a theoretical piece of work by Giacomo Luchetta, a Ph.D. student in Law and Economics at LUISS University, Rome, Italy, and also a researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, Belgium, and his co-author Sven Höppner, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Law and Economics, Gent University Law School, Belgium. Their paper "Praising Their Own Wine: EU Legislators and Non-Falsifiable Statements in Impact Assessments" theorizes why the EU parliament accepts non-falsifiable statements in regulatory impact assessments prepared by the European Commission. The authors rely on principal-agent theory and transaction cost theory. However, the most innovative aspect of the paper is that the authors also use social-psychological theories and behavioural economics to explain the lack of retaliation by EU legislators.

About the award

The Prize is in honour of Giandomenico Majone for his outstanding contribution to the study of regulatory governance in the European Union and beyond.

It recognizes exceptional research presented at the Biennial Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance. The Prize addresses scholars in their early career stages, e.g. colleagues who have completed their Ph.D. no more than seven years prior to nomination, and is preferably awarded to single-authored papers. The submissions are assessed by a jury, based on the academic merit of the paper. This includes the relevance and development of the research question, the contribution that the article makes to existing scientific knowledge or theory in the field of regulatory governance, the use of sources, the methodological rigor, the quality of the analysis and the conclusions.

The previous winners of the award are:

• 2010: Hanan Haber
• 2008: John Mikler

For the full list of previous prize winners, please see here.