Due to inconsistent concepts of regulatory stringency, scholars offer conflicting accounts about whether competing private governance initiatives “race to the bottom,” “ratchet up,” “converge,” or “diverge.” To remedy this, we offer a framework for more systematic comparisons across programs and over time. We distinguish three often-conflated measures of stringency: regulatory scope, prescriptiveness, and performance levels. Applying this framework, we compare competing U.S. forestry certification programs, one founded by environmental activists and their allies, the other by the national industry association. We find ‘upwardly divergent’ policy prescriptiveness: both programs increased in prescriptiveness, but this increase was greater for the activist-backed program. Furthermore, requirements added by the activist-backed program were more likely to impose costs on firms than requirements added by the industry-backed program, many of which may even benefit firms. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that industry-backed programs emphasize less costly types of stringency than activist-backed programs. They also reveal patterns of change that previous scholarship failed to anticipate, illustrating how disentangling types of stringency can improve theory building and testing.

中文翻译：

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私人监管会加强吗？如何区分监管严格性的类型和变化模式

由于监管严格性的概念不一致，学者们对相互竞争的私人治理举措是“竞相逐底”、“渐进式”、“趋同”还是“发散”提出了相互矛盾的解释。为了解决这个问题，我们提供了一个框架，用于跨程序和随着时间的推移进行更系统的比较。我们区分了三种经常被混淆的严格性衡量标准：监管范围、规定性和绩效水平。应用这个框架，我们比较了竞争性的美国林业认证项目，一个由环保活动家及其盟友创立，另一个由国家行业协会创立。我们发现“向上发散”的政策规定性：两个计划的规定性都增加了，但对于激进主义支持的计划来说，这种增加更大。此外，与行业支持的计划增加的要求相比，激进主义支持的计划增加的要求更有可能给公司带来成本，其中许多甚至可能使公司受益。这些结果与以下假设一致，即行业支持的计划比激进主义者支持的计划强调成本更低的严格类型。他们还揭示了以前的学术研究未能预料到的变化模式，说明了严格的类型如何可以改善理论构建和测试。