Marc Allen Eisner - Regulatory Politics in an Age of Polarization and Drift: Beyond Deregulation

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REGULATORY POLITICS IN AN AGE OF POLARIZATION AND DRIFT

Regulatory change is typically understood as a response to significant crises like the Great Depression, or salient events that focus public attention, like Earth Day 1970. Without discounting the importance of these kinds of events, change often assumes more gradual and less visible forms. But how do we see change, and what institutions and processes are behind it? In this book, author Marc Allen Eisner brings these questions to bear on the analysis of regulatory change, walking the reader through a clear-eyed and careful examination of:

Demonstrating that transparency and accountabilitythe hallmarks of public regulationare increasingly absent, and that deregulation was but one factor in our most recent significant financial collapse, the Great Recession, this book urges readers to look beyond deregulation and consider the broader political implications for our current system of voluntary participation in regulatory programs and the proliferation of publicprivate partnerships. This book provides an accessible introduction to the complex topic of regulatory politics, ideal for upper-level and graduate courses on regulation, government and business, bureaucratic politics, and public policy.

Marc Allen Eisner is Dean of the Social Sciences, Henry Merritt Wriston Chair of Public Policy, and Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, US. He is the author of several books, most recently The American Political Economy, 2e (Routledge, 2014, named CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title) and (with James Gosling) Economics, Politics, and American Public Policy, 2e (Routledge, 2013).

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REGULATORY POLITICS IN AN AGE OF POLARIZATION AND DRIFT

Beyond Deregulation

Marc Allen Eisner

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First published 2017
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The right of Marc Allen Eisner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eisner, Marc Allen, author.
Title: Regulatory politics in an age of polarization and drift : beyond deregulation / by Marc Allen Eisner.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016037866| ISBN 9781138183421 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138183438 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315645865 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Industrial policyUnited StatesHistory. | DeregulationUnited StatesHistory.
Classification: LCC HD3616.U62 E37 2017 | DDC 338.973dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037866

ISBN: (hbk) 978-1-138-18342-1
ISBN: (pbk) 978-1-138-18343-8
ISBN: (ebk) 978-1-315-64586-5

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

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For Patricia

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When I began studying regulation in the mid-1980s, scholars were focused on the issue of deregulation, and with good reason. The recent Ford and Carter presidencies had promoted deregulation as a response to the larger macroeconomic problems of the 1970s and the difficulty of managing them with traditional fiscal policy. By the 1980s, the Reagan administration embraced deregulation as part of a larger effort to redefine the role of the state in the market. With a few important exceptionsmost notably in financethe major deregulatory initiatives occurred in the 1970s and, by the mid-1980s, deregulation seemed to have run its course. Yet, many contemporary accounts of regulation assume that we are still in a deregulatory era. This book has been written as a response to these claims. The core argument is that we have entered a period when polarization and gridlock in Congress have impeded the passage of significant new statutes to recalibrate the regulatory state. As a result, the disjunction between regulatory authority and the larger environment has only grown greater over time. One response has been a greater reliance on voluntary programs and partnerships that promise to extend, however imperfectly, regulatory capacity by devolving authority on to regulated parties and leveraging their resources. In other cases, policy simply has failed to adapt to the most important changes in industry practice. Regulators continue to regulate, but they often regulate the wrong thingswith devastating consequences.

This book, in large part, represents decades of research and teaching on the subject of regulation. Papers that contained some of the arguments and cases that would contribute to the book were presented to other scholars in Boston (Northeastern University), Durham (Duke University), Grenoble (International Conference on Public Policy), Milan (International Conference on Public Policy), Paris (Science Po and OECD), Portland (New England Political Science Association), San Francisco (American Political Science Association), and Washington DC (Georgetown), and to my students and colleagues at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Along the way, I have benefited greatly from the generosity of fellow travelers, most notably my two friends and coauthors, Jeff Worsham and Evan Ringquist. Evans untimely death in 2014 left an enormous gap in the lives of those who knew him and a larger universe of scholars who relied on his excellent research on regulation to inform their own work. I have also benefited from fellow scholars and policymakers I encountered in multiple projects organized by the Tobin Project and the Kennan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. In each case, they challenged and refined my understanding of regulation, political economy, and the dynamics of change.

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As always, the greatest thanks are reserved for my wife and best friend, Patricia. For more than three decades, she has been a source of encouragement, happiness, and wisdom.

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