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DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.35735.98727 ·Available from: Slobodan Tomic, Aug 25, 2016
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Trends in Regulation Scholarship (2009-2015)
Working paper, Regulation in Crisis (LSE Centre for Risk and Analysis)
Author: Slobodan Tomic, s.tomic@lse.ac.uk
To get an appreciation of recent trends in the regulation scholarship, this piece offers a survey of the
regulation articles published between 2009 and 2015 in prominent international academic journals.
First, this paper considers articles published in Regulation & Governance. This journal, of course, cannot
offer an exhaustive account of all regulation scholarship. However as the pre-eminent forum for
exchange of research and ideas in the field of regulation it provides insights into the wider trends as to
how scholarship has been evolving. The following analyses 119 R&G articles in total, excluding special
issue and symposium papers.
The analysis will also include regulation articles1 from the top journals from the fields of public policy &
administration and political science2, respectively. The public policy & administration journals are:
1. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART); 2. Policy Studies Journal (PSJ); 3. Public
Administration Review (PAR); 4. Governance (GOV); 5. Public Administration (PA). The political science
journals include: 1. American Journal of Political Science (AJPS); 2. American Political Science Review
(APSR); 3. Journal of Politics (JoP); 4. Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS); 5. Comparative Political
Studies (CPS).
The paper is interested in three major questions:
(a) What have been key policy areas, methods, and analytical interests in the regulation
scholarship?
(b) How responsive has the scholarship been to the 2008 global financial crisis which exposed major
flaws in the system of financial regulation?
(c) Which of the three scenarios raised about a decade ago to predict the future direction of
regulation scholarship – (i) ‘fading away’, (ii) ‘plodding along’, or (iii) ‘rejuvenation’ (Lodge 2008)
– has materialised in the meantime?
A. Dominant approaches and interests
I. Approach
The first question concerns the articles’ focus, namely their analytical interest. Four broad variants can
be distinguished, as illustrated in Table 1.
1 Those featuring ‘regulat*’ in the abstract, excluding articles that are ruled out upon a closer reading (due to the lack of
regulatory perspective).
2 As ranked by Google Metrics.
2
TABLE 1 Four possible analytical interests in regulation articles.
Approach
Focus
Typical questions
1. Enforcement as the
independent variable
How does the enforcement of an actor,
programme, policy, or regulatory
regime unfold in practice.
- What the observed effects are?
- Are there unintended consequences; does a given approach
produce the effects assumed by the underlying theory?
- Under what conditions does a specific outcome occur?
- What are the determinants of outcome variations?
2. Decision-
making/regulatory
regime as the dependent
variable
Explain the evolution of a regulatory
regime, norm, instrument,
arrangement.
- What were the factors shaping its development?
- If variations in policies/regulatory regimes are observed, what
caused them?
3. Conceptual
contributions
Build and alter concepts, frameworks,
and indicators related to regulation
issues.
- How can we facilitate study of a regulatory phenomenon?
- How can we measure or compare regulatory phenomena?
4. Normative
considerations
Consider the merits and pitfalls of
particular regulatory approaches, and
why they are theoretically (un)suitable.
- Why a certain regulatory approach is wrong/promising?
- What would be better alternatives for a given problem?
The empirical analysis reveals that a large majority of the R&G articles falls in the first group which
mainly features empirical testing of the effects of a specific regulatory regime, norm, instrument, or
actor (e.g. does a risk-based regime work and under what conditions; what are the effects of procedural
justice or impact assessments; observed benefits and drawbacks of self-regulation; what are regulatory
outcomes of a particular institutional design). More than 80 per cent of R&G articles explores
enforcement in a particular context, outnumbering the other three analytical interests.
Enforcement
Reg. approach as DV
Theory,
conceptualisation
Normative
0
20
40
60
80
100
Number of articles
FIGURE 1 Key concerns among R&G articles.
Only twelve (about 10 per cent) of the articles focused on explaining the development or adoption of a
policy/regulatory regime/mechanism (e.g. how global trade standards evolved; why varying risk-
approaches were adopted across states; why an EU policy was adopted in its original form, defying
external pressures), seven articles were predominantly concerned with analytical frameworks (e.g. how
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to measure cooperation in international competition; what capacity-building means as a notion), and
only three articles offered normative views on particular regulation-related issues (e.g. why it is not
legitimate to comply with transnational regulation).
This suggests that the R&G scholarship has placed most emphasis on trying to understand the logics of
operation and consequences of ‘big’ regulatory doctrines (meta-regulation; self-regulation; responsive-
regulation), tools, and institutions. Interest in understanding the origins of those policies and
instruments, in specific contexts, has been lower. The low number of works that focus on conceptual
issues implies that either the field has already gone through a stage of ‘concept maturation’ in which
most of the necessary frameworks were elaborated, or that regulation scholarship has no difficulty
borrowing concepts from other fields in public policy or public administration to examine regulatory
phenomena. The lack of interest in normative issues suggests that regulation scholarship is first and
foremost preoccupied with empirical questions, whereas other fields such as political theory or
sociology are more natural habitats for ‘value-laden’ concerns.
The following graph compares approaches across the 10 selected journals from the fields of public policy
& administration and political science:
JPART
PSJ
PAR
GOV
PA
AJPS
APSR
JoP
JCMS
CPS
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Regulatory approach as DV
Enforcement
Theory, conceptualisation
Normative
Number of articles
FIGURE 2 Key concerns in the top 5 public policy & administration (on the left) and top 5 political science journals
(on the right half).
It is noticeable that the ’enforcement approach’ has been most present in the journals, both in total and
more or less in each journal respectively (AJPS adn APSR had only a few regulation related articles, so
their empirical basis is insufficient for such considerations). Interestingly, in some of journals articles
featuring ’theory/conceptualisation’ approach have outnumbered those focusing on explaining
regulatory regimes, but other journals (e.g. the first two in pp&pa – JPART and PSJ; or CPS) featured
more articles that have a regulatory regime/case as the dependent variable than those aimed at
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theorising or conceptualisation. At the same time, in journals like PAR, GOV, and JCMS ’normative’
concerns have been more prevalent than those explaining regulatory regimes. Although the absolute
number of articles is low, this pattern may indicate that there is no particular hierarchy of interest
among the other areas of analytical concern.
In sum, therefore, one can identify a common pattern in regulation scholarship, both in the specialist
Regulation & Governance journal and in other journals: there is a strong dominance in terms of interest
in exploring enforcement-related questions.
II. Methods
What methods have been deployed in the regulation articles? Has there been a ‘quantitative’ turn
relying on the application of econometric methods, or qualitative case studies have kept dominating the
scholarship?
The graph below suggests that the qualitative approach, based on in-depth case studies which usually
rely on process-tracing, comprises half the R&G sample. On the other hand, roughly every sixth article
applied econometrics, on a large-N sample of data, and every tenth article used a ‘simpler’ form of
quantitative analysis. Overall, qualitative case studies (62) outnumber quantitative analyses (37).
Quantative (non-
regression)
Econometrics
(regression)
Cross-sector
Comparative cases
Case study,
process-tracing
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Number of articles
Since 14 articles featured cross-policy comparisons, it may be concluded that the R&G scholarship has
done little to bridge the cross-sector gap and that an ‘atomised’, single-policy focus, has taken hold. The
‘comparative cases’ category in Figure 2 denotes articles featuring small-N comparisons - mainly cross-
country but there are also cross-program or cross-agency comparisons within the same country. Some
FIGURE 3 Methods used in R&G.
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of these studies include qualitative case studies of the cases used in the comparison (the categories in
the graph are not necessarily mutually exclusive).The structure of methods in the other 10 journals
corresponds to the respective journals’ wider overarching methodological outlook.
III. Where empirical evidence comes from
Though a majority of analyses continues to involve the OECD world, the impression is that the gap
between OECD and non-OECD world studies has been diminishing3. A comparison with a sample of
regulation articles from a pre-2009 period would reveal whether empirical research of non-OECD
territories have been ‘catching up’ with OECD ones over time, but regrettably such data is not available
as R&G was founded in 2007.
One portion of the R&G articles – almost one third of the sample – does not draw on empirical material
from any of the two worlds. These articles either do not feature an empirical analysis or are focused on
transnational regulation. Finally, there are very few studies that compare OECD and non-OECD
countries4 and explore the differences in regulatory logics between them (only a few studies in the
whole sample of 119 articles).
OECD
Non-OECD
0
20
40
60
80
Number of articles
FIGURE 4 Where empirical evidence comes from.
3 Most of the OECD studies are from a US or EU context, whereas in the non-OECD world big countries such as Brazil, China, or
Mexico are drawing increasing interest.
4 Such articles were double-coded, that is one article is assigned to both the ‘OECD’ and ‘non-OECD’ group.
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A similar picture emerges in the other 10 journals:
JPART
PSJ
PAR
GOV
PA
AJPS
APSR
JoP
JCMS
CPS
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
OECD
non-OECD
FIGURE 5 Where empirical evidence comes from, in the pp & pa and political science articles.
Every journal in this sample featured more studies from the OECD world than from developing
countries, but while the gap between OECD and non-OECD is large in some journals (e.g. PA and JPART),
in journals like GOV and CPS the non-OECD pool constituted about 40 per cent of all regulation studies.
The more regulation studies a journal published, the larger this gap seems to be. One possible
explanation is that its empirical evidence is harder to come by when researching non-OECD countries .
IV. Policy sectors
As can be seen in the table below, regulation scholarship has analysed a wide variety of policy sectors.
Categorising articles into policies/sectors is not without difficulties – sometimes one issue concerns two
overlapping sectors, at other times several policy categories can be grouped into a ‘unifying’ policy
group, certain policy fields can be decomposed into ‘sub-categories’ and so on. Regardless of this
‘classification bias’, Table 2 indicates the diversity of sectors and issues that have been explored in the
articles:
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TABLE 2 Number of R&G articles per policy/sector.
Policy/sector
R&G
JPART
PSJ
PAR
GOV
PA
AJPS
APSR
JoP
JCMS
CPS
Environment, sustainability, and wildlife
16
4
7
4
2
3
2
3
Healthcare
11
3
1
5
Finance, financial regulation, and banking
11
1
7
4
2
1
5
Prosecution, corruption, and financial crime
6
3
1
Food and food safety
5
1
1
3
3
Market competition and property rights
4
1
7
1
Security and defense
4
2
Labour policy
4
1
1
1
Disasters and transnational crises
4
1
1
Global trade and fair trade
4
1
Taxation
3
1
Internet
3
1
Retail
3
Energy
3
1
Construction, building, infrastructure
2
2
Procurements
2
1
Education, skills formation, science, culture
4
1
1
2
1
Transportation
2
1
1
1
1
Audit and accounting
2
Production standards
2
Social security/justice
2
1
1
3
1
2
Law enforcement
1
Public admin, gov. structure, agencies
1
2
6
2
5
1
5
Nanotechnologies
1
Non-profit economics
1
NGO
1
1
Synthetic biology
1
Media
1
1
1
Technology
1
1
2
Lobbying, business interests
2
1
1
1
2
Global trade
1
Tobacco
1
Energy
1
1
Industrial policy
1
Telecoms
1
1
Transparency, ethics, integrity
3
1
1
(De)regulation, regulatory approaches, tools
1
2
2
4
1
1
1
1
3
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In the R&G articles, social regulation has been studied more frequently than economic regulation.
Environment and healthcare issues drew more interest than financial regulation, with food (safety) and
prosecution/corruption/crime coming behind, followed by market competition, security & defense, and
labour policy.
Environment has been the most studied field in a number of other journals, like JPART, PAR, and GOV,
but in other places, such as PA and JCMS, environment has been among the less or even least studied
topics. Journals that placed a greater emphasis on financial and market regulation are JCMS and GOV.
Public administration, government structure and architecture of public services has been a common
topic across all journals. Overall, while social regulation seems to have dominated scholarship, there is
considerable variation across journals. This might be a reflection of journals’ editorial policies, or stem
from the fact that certain articles trigger ‘successor’ articles in the same journal.
Summary
What trends can be gleaned from the above?
In short, regulation scholarship seems to have been preoccupied with empirical explorations of how
regulation works in practice – whether and when various approaches lead to optimal or unintended
outcomes; the exploration of these issues has largely been carried out in a qualitative manner, through
case studies, though the number of quantitative analyses is not negligible and also certain journals,
according to its editorial policy, prefer quantitative methods over qualitative; most empirical material is
gathered from OECD countries; a wide variety of policy sectors/fields has been studied, with no
dominant topic across the journals. There has been a trend of ‘atomisation’ in the regulation
scholarship, with a high number of single-issue pieces of research and rare studies straddling cross-
sector divides, and with little overarching theory (frameworks) that would build on the extant findings.
B. Financial crisis and surge in interest in financial regulation
Has the 2008 financial crisis shifted the key interests of the regulation scholarship, in the direction of
increasing study of financial regulation? Among the various hypothetical scenarios could be:
1. Yes, the financial breakdown has turned the scholarship’s attention to the issues of (global)
financial regulation and vulnerabilities of the extant financial regime(s), including debates about
remedies and trade-offs;
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2. Some reflections concerning the crisis were made, but this has not fundamentally altered the
structure of the regulation scholarship;
3. The scholarship did not reflect on the crisis in a way in which such a big shock would lead us
to expect; this scenario can be called ‘business as usual’, that is – as if nothing happened.
It can be seen in Table 2 above that finance, financial regulation, and banking has been among the most
studied phenomena in some journals (JCMS, R&G, GOV, PAR). At the same time, a considerable portion
of these articles were not about the financial crisis strictly defined. Some examine particular instruments
of regulation in the banking sector, others discuss the alleged ineffectiveness of offshore zones
regulation, and there also were concerns related to inherent organisational tensions within banks (e.g.
focusing on trade-offs between commercial gains and internal management compliance). Other studies
concern accounting standards in the finance industry, microfinance instruments, or who the winners
and losers of a global financial regulation are.
Thus, it seems safe to say that the crisis has not fundamentally shaped the regulation scholarship by
shifting its key focus on the question of financial regulation and post-crisis responses. While some
journals may have devoted more attention to the financial crisis and financial regulation (including the
publication of special issues devoted to the crisis), there is little evidence that this has been the
dominant trend in regulation scholarship. Instead, recent developments in regulation scholarship seem
to lie somewhere between the second and third scenario, depending on journal. (This, of course, is not
to negate the possibility that in other disciplines and forums, the financial crisis and the regulation of
financial markets might have attracted greater interest).
C. What future has held for regulation scholarship?
Nearly a decade ago, Lodge (2008: 295-298) discussed three possible scenarios for the future
development of regulation scholarship:
TABLE 3 Three scenarios for regulation scholarship (Adopted from Lodge 2008).
Scenario
Characteristics
1 ‘Fading away’
- Core concerns of the regulation scholarship become less relevant over time; the ‘passing fad’ eventually
leads to the disappearance of the field;
- Unclear disciplinary boundaries or exhaustion of intellectual effort (“regulation becomes the study of
everything”) are factors contributing to the marginalisation/disappearance of the field.
2 ‘Plodding along’
- Expansion of disciplinary interest toward new fields and emerging issues (e.g. fast developing
technologies);
- Increasing exploration of phenomena that we still have to learn about from empirical cases (e.g. in the
fields of utility networks, social regulation, or risk management);
- Discovery of niche topics, which could come at the cost of possible fragmentation of knowledge
(“knowing more and more about less and less”)
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3 ‘Rejuvenation’
- Stronger focus on the language, cultures and side-effects of regulation;
- Need for better understanding of competing logics of regulation, different regulatory regimes, and the
impact of ongoing worldwide governance trends (e.g. rising internationalisation, labour mobility,
liberalisation) on regulatory practices;
- Inquiring capacity of nation states to address regulatory challenges, at the national and international
level;
- Invention of advanced methodologies for the study of the above concerns.
Nearly a decade later – are there any emerging patterns? Table 4 may provide indicators of the 10 pp &
pa and political science journals’ publications in the field of regulation:
TABLE 4 Presence of regulation articles in the analysed journals.
Journal
Overall number of articles (2009-2015)
Number of regulation
articles
Percentage of regulation
articles
Public policy & administration
JPART
309
14
4,5%
PSJ
208
10
4,8%
PAR
565
32
5,7%
GOV
200
20
10%
PA
359
29
8,1%
Political science
AJPS
412
3
0,7%
APSR
321
3
0,9%
JoP
583
7
1,2%
JCMS
335
36
10,8%
CPS
420
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2,6%
While public policy & administration has obviously seen a greater interest in regulation studies than
political science, the topic of regulation has attracted only limited attention across all of these fields’
journals. With the exception of two journals – GOV and JCMC, and to an extent PA, regulation-related
articles constitute less than 10 per cent of the journals’ overall output. This seems a decline in interest in
the study of regulation compared to the pre 2009-period, as for instance the annual ratio of regulation
articles in European politics journals stood about 10 per cent between 2003 to 2007 (Lodge 2008: 281).
At first, this may be a sign of the ‘fade away’ scenario – the study of regulation has seen saturation, the
unclear boundaries of regulation studies study played into the hands of political science and public
administration that deployed own concepts, methods, and language to take over the content and
concerns of the study of regulation. Only those few journals that have achieved a 10 per cent ratio of
regulation articles have sustained some level of interest in regulation studies.
However, it is important to note that concomitantly with the above trend one particular journal - R&G -
has managed to consolidate the field of regulation by generating and sustaining significant interest in
the study of regulation, solidifying its terminological and conceptual apparatus and advancing a distinct
platform for regulatory perspectives. Despite certain similarities and overlapping questions, as well as its
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interdisciplinary appeal, the study of regulation advanced here seems to have managed to profile itself
as a distinct field. In that sense, in parallel with a relatively low amount of interest in regulation in the
field of political science and, to a slightly lesser extent, in the field of public policy & administration, a
countervailing trend of regulation’s maturation and consolidation has unfolded over the course of the
last six years.
Whether R&G has just served to attract those regulation concerns that would have otherwise ended up
in the public policy & administration journals, or whether R&G acted itself as a generator of interest in
the study of regulation, the following seems certain: the field of regulation has seen many elements of
the ‘rejuvenation’ scenario materialise since 2009. Rising interest in understanding competing logics of
regulation, effects of different regulatory regimes and tools, the interaction between national and
supra-national level as well as role of transnational regulation, or how globalisation and related trends
of capital and labour mobility affect regulatory practices, have been among the key concerns in the
study of regulation advanced in R&G. True, the exploration of these issues has not seen the introduction
of novel methodologies, but the study of regulation has proven capable of addressing its key questions
using the ‘standard’ qualitative and quantitative methods, well-established and practiced in political
science and related (sub)disciplines.
At the same time, there is little evidence of ‘plodding along’. While regulation scholarship has shown
interest in investigating emerging and little explored fields such as those associated with the explosive
rise of technology (e.g. nano-technologies, bio-technology, medicine, GMO, some recently advanced
environmental issues, internet governance), the interest in these ‘niche’ topics remains marginal when
compared to the long-standing concerns such as those related to regulation of health and healthcare
practices, financial markets and market competition, as well as long-standing environmental issues.
Much of the regulation literature has shown interest in the empirical testing of ‘grand’ theoretical
approaches. Rather than producing more and more knowledge about ‘smaller and smaller’ corners of
regulatory interest –regulation scholarship has gravitated towards linking empirical cases to overriding
regulatory philosophies and strategies. It is therefore difficult to suggest that there has been a trend
towards ‘niche-isation’ (“knowing more and more about less and less”) over the course of the past
decade.
In summary, while signs of ‘fading away’ could be observed across the public policy & administration
and particularly across political science scholarship, the major platform for the study of regulation –
R&G – seems to have succeeded in sustaining an opposite trend of ‘rejuvenation’. This may indicate a
growing interest in the study of regulation, but another viable interpretation would be that the channels
of production and dissemination of regulation knowledge have shifted away from the classic political
science and public policy & administration platforms to those fully dedicated to regulation concerns
only.
Concluding remarks
Returning to the three major questions posed at the outset of the paper, the following conclusions can
be made. First, the study of regulation has been dominated by efforts of empirical assessments of
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particular regimes and tools, and what the lessons of these cases are for broader theoretical approaches
and regulatory doctrines. The majority of studies still come from the OECD world, are carried out mostly
in qualitative manner – though quantitative regulation studies are far from rare, and with little cross-
sectoral and with more single-issue/single-field explorations. Second, the big financial crisis (2007-2008)
has not triggered a fundamental shift in the regulation scholarship in terms of an increasing interest in
financial regulation. This topic has remained an important concern for regulation scholars, but has not
become as dominant, at least not in the journals examined as part of this study. Third, regulation
scholarship has neither ‘faded away’ nor ‘plodded along’. Instead, elements of ‘rejuvenation’ could be
observed in the recent developments in the study of regulation, with a shift away from public
administration and political science to dedicated regulation forums.
Bibliography
Lodge, M. (2008). Regulation, the regulatory state and European politics. West European Politics, 31(1-
2), 280-301.
Journals analysed (2009-2016)
Regulation & Governance
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Policy Studies Journal
Public Administration Review
Governance
Public Administration
American Journal of Political Science
American Political Science Review
Journal of Politics
Journal of Common Market Studies
Comparative Political Studies
- CitationsCitations0
- ReferencesReferences1
- [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: [From the introduction]. The term ‘regulatory state’ entered the vocabulary of students of European Politics over twelve years ago with the publication, in West European Politics, of Giandomenico Majone’s seminal ‘The rise of the regulatory state in Europe’ (Majone 1994).1 Underlying Majone’s argument was the diagnosis of two key trends, one being an overall shift towards the use of legal authority or regulation over the other tools of stabilisation and redistribution, the other the European Commission’s expansionist role through the use of influence over policy content in the face of an absence of other, especially budgetary tools (see also Majone 1997a). Since then, it has become commonplace to state that we live in the age of the regulatory state, characterised by privatisation of public services, the establishment of quasi-autonomous regulatory authorities and the formalisation of relationships within policy domains (see Loughlin and Scott 1997, Moran 2002). This paper enquires into four broad concerns. First, what are the sources of this supposed rise of the regulatory state in Europe and does it represent a distinct policy development? Second, what has been the ‘value added’ in terms of empirical and analytical insights for the study of European Politics (and more broadly, Comparative Politics)? Third, does the age of the regulatory state constitute a new age of stability of the state in Europe? Fourth, and in conclusion, what is the future of (the study of) regulation?
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