If not party mandates, then what? The determinants of legislative agendas

What determines changes in the focus of laws over time? Before turning to the impact of democratic mandates, this chapter examines alternative explanations focusing on globalization, the rise of regulatory politics and its effects on redistribution; social change and the emergence of post-materialism; friction and cognitive constraints resulting in punctuated equilibrium patterns of attention; and the hypothesis of a broadening of policy agendas leading governments to deal with a growing number of issues. Panel negative binomial regressions of data collected by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) on legislative priorities in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, confirm that further explanations are needed. Among the different explanations that we explore, only globalization seems to have some impact on legislative agendas in terms of the relative weight of regulatory and redistributive policies. These first tests set the landscape and provide guidance as to potential covariates to take into account when analysing the role of parties and party competition in the subsequent chapters.

Creating Regulatory Harmony: The Participatory Politics of OECD Chemical Testing Standards in the Making

In recent decades, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has become a powerful forum for trade liberalization and regulatory harmonization. OECD members have worked to reconcile divergent national regulatory approaches, applying a single framework across sovereign states, in effect determining whose knowledge-making practices would guide regulatory action throughout the industrialized world. Focusing on US regulators, industry associations, and environmental groups, this article explores the participatory politics of OECD chemical regulation harmonization in the late 1970s to early 1980s. These efforts were conditioned by differential institutional access and resources among stakeholders who sought to shape regulatory knowledge rules. Facing competing European and US approaches to chemical data—a minimum “base set” of test data versus case-by-case determinations—OECD members chose the European approach in 1980. However, US regulatory politics shifted with the election of President Reagan, prompting industry associations to lobby the US government to block the agreement. Examining the micropolitics of these standards in the making, I demonstrate that while long-term structures advantaged industrial actors, ideological alignment with the US government precipitated their decisive influence. The case illustrates the importance of attending to the distinctive politics of international harmonization and the effects on transnational knowledge-making and regulatory intervention.

Elections, Institutions, and the Regulatory Politics of Platform Governance: The Case of the German NetzDG

Policy proposals for higher rules and standards governing how major user- generated content platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube moderate socially problematic content have become increasingly prevalent since the negotiation of the German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) in 2017. Although a growing body of scholarship has emerged to assess the normative and legal dimensions of these regulatory developments in Germany and beyond, the legal scholarship on intermediary liability leaves key questions about why and how these policies are developed, shaped, and adopted unanswered. The goal of this article is thus to provide a deep case study into the NetzDG from a regulatory politics perspective, highlighting the importance of political and regulatory factors currently under-explored in the burgeoning interdisciplinary literatures on platform governance and platform regulation. The empirical account presented here, which draws on 30 interviews with stakeholders involved in the debate around the NetzDG’s adoption, as well as hundreds of pages of deliberative documents obtained via freedom of information access requests, outlines how the NetzDG took shape, and how it overcame various significant obstacles (ranging from resistance from other stakeholders and the European Union’s frameworks against regulatory fragmentation) to eventually become law. The article argues, throughout this case study, that both domestic politics and transnational institutional constraints are crucial policy factors that should receive more attention as an important part of platform regulation debates.

Redistributing Agency: The Control Roots of Spot Pricing of Electricity

The paper traces the development of the “spot pricing” for electrical power, which has provided the technique for calculating electricity prices in wholesale markets in most of the U.S., and is rapidly becoming the standard in many other countries. The model was first formalized by a group of engineers and economists associated with engineering professor Fred Schweppe, at MIT. From his position as a leading control theorist, well-known in the industry, Schweppe proposed an expansion of control theory that he argued would help break the deadlock in regulatory politics and benefit producers and consumers of power alike. He introduced the approach, which he called “homeostatic control” around 1978 in a seminar of the MIT Energy Lab. Derived by way of a biological metaphor, homeostatic control conceives of a self-correcting system that maintains its equilibrium state in the face of a changing environment. As Schweppe and his collaborators put it, their aim was “an efficient, internally-correcting control scheme” . Homeostatic control marked a departure from the “load-following” approach of system operators, who would constantly adjust the dispatch of power to meet the changing demand, or load. Schweppe’s group envisioned bringing consumers of power into the control system by constantly feeding them signals in the form of prices. The MIT team discovered through the contact between economists and engineers, the calculation for determining efficient prices is identical to the calculation used by engineers for meeting system load while minimizing costs. The Lagrange multipliers, or lambdas, derived from the engineering optimization are the best estimates of the marginal cost, and therefore the efficient prices, at each node of the system.

Regulatory Politics in South Africa 25 Years After Apartheid

This paper explores debates and politics over the place of regulatory democracy in contemporary South African constitutionalism. Twenty-five years after the formal legal transition from apartheid, regulatory institutions – by and large not the focus of negotiations in the early 1990s – have increasingly assumed prominence within the South African state. Such organisations and their functions do not fit easily within one ‘branch’ of the classic legal theory of the separation of powers into three parts, namely the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive. A typology of regulatory institutions in the South African polity includes at least four distinct types. The work of these regulatory organisations in formulating and implementing law in post-apartheid South Africa has become significant in politics, especially over the past decade. While the existence and operation of regulatory institutions does not itself comprise the whole of regulatory politics, such organisations do constitute a crucial component of and locus for such politics.

Redistributing Agency

The article traces the development of “spot pricing” for electrical power, which has provided the technique for calculating electricity prices in wholesale markets in most of the United States, and is rapidly becoming the standard in many other countries. The model was first formalized by a group of engineers and economists associated with the engineering professor Fred Schweppe, at MIT. From his position as a leading control theorist, well known in the industry, Schweppe proposed an expansion of control theory that he argued would help break the deadlock in regulatory politics and benefit producers and consumers of power alike. He introduced the approach, which he called “homeostatic control,” around 1978 in a seminar of the MIT Energy Lab. Derived by way of a biological metaphor, homeostatic control conceives of a self-correcting system that maintains its equilibrium state in the face of a changing environment. Schweppe’s group envisioned bringing consumers of power into the control system by constantly feeding them signals in the form of prices. The MIT team discovered through the contact between economists and engineers that the calculation for determining efficient prices is identical to the calculation used by engineers for meeting system load while minimizing costs. The Lagrange multipliers, or lambdas, derived from the engineering optimization are the best estimates of the marginal cost, and therefore the efficient prices, at each node of the system.