Evidence on the relationship between government size and corruption is mixed, and might be misleading, as government size is usually measured by fiscal size. The core hypothesis in this research is that the type of government intervention in the economy – rather than the size of government – is a key explanatory factor for corruption. The empirical analysis disentangles the effects of the two main

Trust is the “glue” connecting state and society and particularly relevant to how front‐line workers, who are the face of public administration vis‐à‐vis citizens, implement policy. Therefore, it is important to examine how front‐line workers' absence of trust in regulators influences the ways they cope with their clients. Our study investigates this question empirically through interviews and focus

In Mathieu et al. (2017), the second equation in Table 3 was published incorrectly. The second number ‘1’ in the numerator should be changed to ‘i’. The correct equation is presented in the table below. Table 3. Equations used in the calculation of the indices Equations Variables Description OP Organizational Proliferation Index a Number of actors in the regulatory arrangement i Number of issues in

Recent scholarship has emphasized the need to develop a polymorphic conceptualization of the regulatory state. This article contributes to this theory‐building project by outlining a research agenda for exploring the symbiotic interactions and tensions between the regulatory and carceral morphs of the state. Using the case study of cannabis legalization reforms in the United States, we argue that the

The right to contest automated decisions as provided by Article 22 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a due process provision with concrete transparency implications. Based on this, the paper in hand aims, first, to provide an interpretation of Art 22 and the right to contest (as the key provision in determining the contours of transparency in relation to automated decisions under

Democratic societies around the world face the challenge of strengthening social integration against a multitude of cultural and ethnic differences. Yet common regulations for integration – from cultural assimilation policies to general education programs – encounter objection, noncompliance, and even backlash among the very groups that the regulator strives to integrate into society. The article analyzes

This article discusses Brazil's prudential developmentalism through a case study that challenges the expected trade‐off between Basel rules and the developmental state. Under the Brazilian arrangement, the Central Bank has substantially implemented the new Basel rules, while policymakers have dealt with significant developmental mechanism. This piece's central claim is that two institutional capacities

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of many technologies that have the potential to fundamentally alter our economic, social, and indeed personal lives. The problems they pose are in many ways unprecedented, posing serious challenges for policymakers. How should governments respond to the challenges given that the technologies are still evolving with unclear trajectories? Are there general

We offer a series of reflective insights about the state and direction of studies related to the politics of regulation. Notably we argue that the field is characterized by persisting divisions between Americanists and Europeanists. Largely focused on the actions taken by political principals, the former regularly report a substantial politicization of regulatory behavior. Reflecting on recent developments

The international nature of supply chains has led to the rise of private authority in regulating the environmental and social impacts of production, which companies frequently address through corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the form of private governance (PG). Despite its claim to establish “global” rules, PG usually has national origins, and multiple efforts to address the same issue from

Why and how the regulation of emerging technologies occurs is not clear in the literature. In this study, we adapt the multiple streams framework – often used for explaining agenda‐setting and policy adoption – to examine the phenomenon. We hypothesize how technological change affects policy‐making and identify conditions under which the streams can be (de‐)coupled. We trace the formulation of the

Climate action has until recently been slow in the shipping industry. The sector is notoriously difficult to regulate by individual states, and international governance is moving slowly. In such a context, networks of actors can potentially contribute to a sustainability transition. In Norway, which is widely considered a leader in maritime environmental innovations, two networks have become prominent

Many countries adhere to the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development creed that innovation is good for the economy. Experiments are often used to intentionally create space for innovation. Decisions allowing experiments result in temporary legal enclaves for a few, excluding many others. Therefore, they come with risks. The aim of this article is to provide a set of guidelines that help

This paper examines the impact of regulation‐driven trade barriers on export entrepreneurship in a panel of 60 countries between 2006 and 2014. The paper finds robust evidence that unfavorable trade regulations significantly reduce export entry rate and export entry density (two critical measures of export entrepreneurship) by increasing the time and cost associated with documentary and customs compliance

Little evidence exists on whether and why organizations comply with regulations that are not monitored or enforced. To address that shortage, this study evaluates the 2007 repeal of an essentially unenforced regulation mandating private and local government employers in Sweden to post their vacancies publicly at the Public Employment Service. Exploiting the fact that central government employers were

Secrecy jurisdictions provide opportunities for nonresidents to escape the laws and regulations of their home countries by allowing them to hide their identities. In this paper we quantify which jurisdictions supply secrecy to which countries and assess how successful countries are in targeting that secrecy with their policies. To that objective, we develop the Bilateral Financial Secrecy Index (BFSI)

Why does it always take a long time to acknowledge environmental hazards such as climate change or air pollution, even when knowledge on their dangers has been available for years? Drawing on the case of French pesticide regulation, this article shows that this gap between knowledge and consequent action results not only from secretive corporate leverage on public decisions and expertise but also from

While there is broad scholarly agreement on the pattern of ever‐growing policy stocks in modern democracies, research on the drivers of policy accumulation is still in its infancy. This holds in particular for the role of crises and external shocks. While the relationship between crisis events and the change of individual policies is fairly uncontested, we lack systematic knowledge on the extent to

International regime complexity has become a prominent feature of the global economy and world politics. The international governance of derivatives markets is a notable case of this phenomenon in finance because a variety of post‐crisis rules have been issued by a multitude of international standard‐setting bodies. By combining the regime complexity and orchestration frameworks, we explain the precision

This study provides a survey of research that uses cross‐country comparisons to examine the relationship between economic regulation and growth. Studies in the peer‐reviewed literature tend to rely on either World Bank or Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development measures of regulation. Those studies seem to reflect a consensus that entry regulation and anticompetitive product and labor

Recent research argues that complex problems such as climate change are best tackled through co‐creation, which brings together public and private actors, including citizens, neighborhoods, and civil society organizations, in collaborative processes that define problems and design and implement solutions that produce innovative public value outcomes. This article explores the viability of co‐creation

This article is an introduction to meta‐research, a systematic and replicable process of synthesizing research findings across a body of original research. After introducing the reader to the core of meta‐research methodology, meta‐research logic and tools are applied to present an evidence synthesis of empirical research on responsive regulation. The article concludes with a meta‐research agenda for

This article highlights a counterintuitive dynamic of neoliberal globalization. India has controversially liberalized foreign investment rules in the politically sensitive food retail sector. Critics argue that India bowed to pressure from multinational corporations, consistent with a common view that under neoliberalism markets eclipse state power. We suggest by contrast that policymakers seek multinational

This article explores how the appeal to depoliticized expertise worked to legitimize increased supervisory and executive power to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, after the 2015 refugee crisis. Frontex is an EU agency operating in a highly salient field, removed from hard‐science “gold standards” of evidence, where member states have been reluctant to delegate power and sovereignty

This article examines how modes of governance are reconfigured as a result of using algorithms in the governance process. We argue that deploying algorithmic systems creates a shift toward a special form of design‐based governance, with power exercised ex ante via choice architectures defined through protocols, requiring lower levels of commitment from governing actors. We use governance of three policy

This article frames whistleblowers as regulatory intermediaries who provide a response to the problem posed by the fragmentation of knowledge in a complex society and market economy. I identify two ways in which whistleblowers become regulatory intermediaries: The first is by remedying informational asymmetries between the regulator and the target (instrumental approach). Both in the United States

Scholars call for “adaptive governance” to balance concern about technology uncertainty with the need for innovation in the governance of emerging technologies. Yet, empirical assessment of such governance systems remains sparse. Do the actors interested in the potential regulation of an emerging technology focus on their own interests and opportunities, or do they think in terms of the collective

In this article, we take forward recent initiatives to assess regulation based on contemporary computer technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence. In order to characterize current phenomena of regulation in the digital age, we build on Karen Yeung's concept of “algorithmic regulation,” extending it by building bridges to the fields of quantification, classification, and evaluation research

Pharmacogenetic tests provide genetic data to tailor drug treatment and were widely predicted to be one of the first fruits of the Human Genome Project. In the mid‐2000s, the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) became an advocate for pharmacogenetic testing, but its efforts to build a market for this new technology brought the agency into dispute with other regulatory actors over the type of evidence

This article provides a framework for explaining professional action in multi‐jurisdictional tax and finance environments, focusing on how relationships between clients, professionals, and regulators shape market structures. Given the complexity of tax and financial regulations within and across national systems, professionals experienced in accounting, financial, legal, and policy systems have opportunities

How would a polycentric property system react to mass movements of people caused by escalating climate change? Drawing on multidisciplinary perspectives, the article suggests an analytical frame for polycentric property system responses to climate migration. The case study is Solomon Islands, a South Pacific state with high levels of environmental vulnerability, where people draw on various governance

Algorithmic decision‐making (ADM) systems have come to support, pre‐empt or substitute for human decisions in manifold areas, with potentially significant impacts on individuals' lives. Achieving transparency and accountability has been formulated as a general goal regarding the use of these systems. However, concrete applications differ widely in the degree of risk and the accountability problems

Surveillance studies have long argued that electronic databases are designed to maximize state surveillance as a “superpanopticon” or “surveillant assemblage.” But how are databases being implemented in practice, and do they actually enhance control? This article addresses these questions by examining the case of the German Central Foreigners Register (Ausländerzentralregister [AZR]). Established in

Private regulatory programs, such as certification schemes, seek to control market access by providing greater certainty about products' credence attributes, including sustainability features of production processes. This article contributes to the literature that assesses the verification processes that determine whether private rules are being followed sufficiently by applicant rule‐targets (usually

The growing interest in customer engagement (CE) has triggered a new wave of reforms, particularly in utility regulation. Within the water sector, there has been a shift from a focus on cost‐reflective pricing toward customer‐centric pricing processes designed to identify customer preferences and expectations. The Victorian water sector in Australia offers a unique opportunity to explore the outcomes

The multilateral adoption of the automatic exchange of information (AEI) on bank accounts held by nonresidents was a breakthrough in the fight against cross‐border tax evasion, which led to a substantial reduction in the value of bank deposits and investment portfolios in traditional tax havens. However, there is suspicion that sophisticated tax evaders engage in regulatory arbitrage of AEI provisions

Arguments in favor of tempering algorithmic decision making with human judgment often appeal to concepts and criteria derived from legal philosophy about the nature of law and legal reasoning, arguing that algorithmic systems cannot satisfy them (but humans can). Such arguments often make implicit appeal to the notion that each case needs to be assessed on its own merits, without comparison to or generalization

How can governments get individuals and firms to pay taxes, especially given increasing tax base erosion via tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering? In this paper we discuss the many different perspectives to explain why people pay – and do not pay – their taxes, especially perspectives based on “responsive regulation,” and we use then these perspectives to suggest policies that governments

Recent scholarship on transnational business governance has begun to examine public‐private interactions and the active role of governments. We make two key contributions that integrate and expand this literature. First, in juxtaposition to functionalist accounts, we foreground the fundamentally political and often contentious character of these interactions. As private transnational governance schemes

I examine the ways in which the global financial crisis that began in 2007, and whose effects arguably condition policymaking to the present day, affected the ongoing global power transition as manifested by the unilateral decisions undertaken by official agencies comprising national regulatory states. The theory of that power transition articulated in the overview paper of this Special Issue is reinterpreted

Transnational sustainability governance often builds upon standards. Considering that the rise of transnational governance has blurred accountability relations, this article interrogates how and with what consequences a standards development organization (SDO) mobilizes standards for the sake of accountability. Following a partial organization perspective, standards are conceptualized as combinations

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring indirect governance at the global level. However, very little work has considered these relationships in the domain of energy. In fragmented global governance domains, such as energy, the G20 has frequently been identified as an actor capable of steering other actors via indirect forms of governance. Yet to date, we do not have answers

What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes;

The international tax system developed as a form of technocratic governance, aimed at facilitating international investment, neglecting provisions for cooperation between national governments for tax enforcement. Its endogenous flaws resulted in its politicization in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, leading to an increasingly technicized form of global governance. The great financial crisis was even

Platform companies like Uber not only disrupt existing markets but also contest existing regulatory regimes. This raises the question of how, when, and why such companies are regulated. This article develops, tests, and defends a theoretical framework that explains the politics of regulatory response to the rise of platform capitalism. Using discourse network analysis and a case study on the regulation

Research about professional trajectories of regulators highlights the exchange of personnel from independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) to the private sector, mainly based on US evidence. However, current studies indicate that revolving doors in different contexts may share more nuances, reflecting the role of different political institutions. Here we rely on sequence analysis to explore the trajectories

This paper analyzes the interactions between the separate components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, both public and private. It examines how far, and through what institutional mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joined‐up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The

Political theories of the modern state describe a rise of the regulatory healthcare state, balancing the imperatives of cost control and quality assurance and welfare norms such as solidarity. This paper analyses the unique case of Switzerland, where the rise of the regulatory healthcare state occurred late and incompletely, with the adoption of the Federal Health Insurance Law in 1994. The Swiss federal

The notion of information is central to data protection law, and to algorithms/machine learning. This centrality gives the impressions that algorithms are just yet another data processing operation to be regulated. A more careful analysis reveals a number of issues. The notion of personal data is notoriously under‐defined, and attempts at clarification from an information theory perspective are also

The U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is responsible for reviewing executive branch agencies' draft proposed and final regulations, coordinating the federal government's regulatory agenda, approving government collections of information from the public, and developing and overseeing the implementation of government‐wide policies related to information policy, information quality

Local governments nationwide have been adopting a variety of sustainability practices in the absence of strong federal guidance. The collection of these practices, which differ in design, forms the local government's sustainability strategy. Some local governments may develop a more focused sustainability strategy to achieve more predictable environmental benefits around a narrower array of environmental

In recent years, many sectors have experienced significant progress in automation, associated with the growing advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. There are already automated robotic weapons, which are able to evaluate and engage with targets on their own, and there are already autonomous vehicles that do not need a human driver. It is argued that the use of increasingly autonomous

Financial crises are often presented as triggers for important innovations in international regulation of financial markets, but existing evidence for this claim primarily derive from the analyses of individual initiatives, assessed against noncomparable benchmarks. In order to provide systematic evidence of financial crises' impact on international financial regulatory change, this paper develops

International tax governance is significant societally as it impacts both inequality and the capacity of governments to deliver on their social contracts. Tax experts forma key, under‐researched, heterogeneous element of the tax ecosystem, subject to a range of hard and soft governance influences. While problematic tax regimes are appropriately identified by reference to lax regulation or financial

Monetary policy and financial regulation have been regarded one of the paradigmatic domains where states can reap the benefits of delegating clearly delineated and unequivocal policy tasks to specialized technocrats. This article discusses the negative side‐effects and unintended consequences of particular ways to partition such tasks. The separation between monetary policy formulation, central banks'

For governments to regulate, they must first define the problem and decide which policymakers have the authority to make decisions. Technological development can disrupt the authority‐allocation process by fostering uncertainty about which actors are responsible for making policy. This article examines the role that changing technology has played in the development of cybersecurity policy in the United

Transnational private sustainability governance, such as eco‐certification, does not operate in a regulatory or jurisdictional vacuum. A public authority may intervene in private governance for various reasons, including to improve private governance's efficient functioning or to assert public regulatory primacy. This article argues that to properly understand the nature of public‐private governance

The term algorithmic governance describes institutional steering effects of algorithmic‐selection applications that increasingly pervade all domains of everyday life. Empirical evidence on algorithmic governance is lacking and mostly limited to information services. This article compares the significance of algorithmic governance – measured by use, subjective significance, awareness, risk awareness

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a disruptive innovation known for its socio‐economic potential, but also for generating unprecedented vulnerabilities and threats. As a dynamic sociotechnical system, the IoT comprises well‐known cybersecurity risks and endemic uncertainties that arise as IoT adoption increases and the system evolves. We highlight the impact of these challenges by analyzing how insecure

This article contributes to debates on algorithmic regulation by focusing on the domain of security. It develops an infrastructural perspective, by analyzing how algorithmic regulation is enacted through the custom‐built transatlantic data infrastructures of the EU‐U.S. Passenger Name Records and Terrorism Financing Tracking Program programs. Concerning regulation through algorithms, this approach