Blockchain is employed as a technology holding a solutionist promise, while at the same time, it is hard for the promissory blockchain applications to become realized. Not only is the blockchain protocol itself not foolproof, but when we move from “blockchain in general” to “blockchain in particular,” we see that new governance structures and ways of collaborating need to be developed to make blockchain

The national quality framework (NQF) has been implemented to improve the safety and quality of alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment and provide a nationally consistent approach to treatment quality in Australia. At the same time, concerns have been raised that, in the absence of appropriate regulatory structures to support the NQF, the quality and safety of AOD treatment services cannot be guaranteed

Scholarly evidence of transparency's beneficial effects on trust and perceptions of corruption remains debated and confined to the study of public administration. We contribute to this debate by extending the study of its effects to transparency legislation concerning members of parliament (MPs), political parties, and business interest groups. In an online experiment conducted in Ireland with 1373

Practices of stakeholder engagement vary widely across voluntary sustainability standard setters. This study examines how the sponsorship structure of standard setters affects the diversity of stakeholders included in consultations and the influence of stakeholder input on standards. I compare six sustainability standard setters through an original dataset of 7945 stakeholder comments submitted during

What explains the levels and diversity of stakeholder participation in public commenting on bureaucratic policymaking? We examine a novel dataset on a stakeholder engagement mechanism recently introduced by the European Commission containing information about 1258 events organized between 2016 and 2019. We highlight the importance of administrative acts' characteristics and acknowledge the role of

In its 20 years of operation, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) has been enormously successful as a private governor of corporate climate risk disclosure. Despite an influx of potentially competitive government-led disclosure initiatives and interventions, the use of CDP's platform has nonetheless accelerated. To explain this outcome, we argue that public interventions augment the value of private

This article takes an actor-centered and bottom-up perspective to analyze how private companies shape public responses to migration in Europe. It builds on ethnographic research with top managers and civil servants involved in visa policy, asylum reception, and immigration detention. Drawing on organizational theories about decisions and change, I analyze empirical evidence to put forward processes

Over the last decade, there has been increased interest in understanding the design (i.e., content) of regulation as a basis for studying regulation formation, implementation, and outcomes. Within this line of research, scholars have been particularly interested in investigating regulatory dynamics relating to features and patterns of regulatory text and have engaged a variety of methodological approaches

Arnoltz, J. (2023) The embedded flexibility of Nordic labor market models under pressure from EU-induced dualization—The case of posted work in Denmark and Sweden. Regulation & Governance, 17, 372–388. The article listed above, intended for publication in the Special Issue,”Grand challenges and the Nordic model: regulatory responses and outcomes Symposium for Regulation & Governance”, volume 17, Issue

How do ultra-religious schools respond to state regulations that conflict with deep-rooted cultural norms? This study investigates this question in the context of Haredi boys schools' decisions regarding Israel's core-curriculum regulations. It draws on a first-of-its-kind dataset of interviews and school data collected from a representative sample of 82 principals and teachers in schools serving 18

The “revolving door” between those at the top of public and private organizations has given rise to questions about the “pull” and “push” factors influencing public servants' switching into lucrative posts with companies they previously regulated. In this study, we investigate the departmental attributes associated with the movement of senior British civil servants into potentially controversial corporate

This article addresses a key political question regarding the relationship between states and their citizens: how harsh are judicial systems in their punishment of those who deviate from the law? Punitiveness is a fraught concept in the existing literature and robust measurement methods maximizing conceptual complexity are lacking. Here I develop a functional approach to punitiveness through a revised

Scholars employ two main measures of the executive constraints embedded in European Union laws: one is based on the variation in the use of different types of restrictions, and the second is based on the frequency of such use. They reflect two alternative conceptualizations of bureaucratic control. We label them, respectively, as the “toolbox perspective” and the “design perspective”. We illustrate

Introducing multiple layers of “independent” structures has become a go-to strategy for public agent oversight. The question remains whether such decentralized, overlapping structural arrangements of oversight reduce regulatory uncertainty and produce better policy outcomes. Using the case study of Ontario, Canada, I examine the consequences of institutional layering for the specific and broader goal

Agencies involved in generating regulatory policies promote evidence-based regulatory impact assessments (RIAs) to improve the predictability of regulation and develop informed policy. Here, we analyze the epistemic foundations of RIAs. We frame RIA as reasoning that connects various types of knowledge to inferences about the future. Drawing on Stephen Toulmin's model of argumentation, we situate deductive

In the fallout of the 2008 crisis, macroprudential policy has been installed as the policy remedy against future financial instability, a primary focus being developments in the real estate sector. With house prices consistently rising in the EU since 2014, causing alarm among macroprudential supervisory bodies, a core question of EU regulatory governance is how far macroprudential bodies have been

Ten years since the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, we have witnessed an increasing trend in Europe toward the adoption of mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence. Focusing on due diligence legislation from France, Germany, Norway, and the EU, this article examines the extent to which these laws are laying the foundations for the articulation of an

Statistical profiling algorithms claiming to predict which jobseekers are at risk of becoming long-term unemployed are spread unevenly across countries. However, the pathways and histories of these tools are understudied. Because the profiling path in France is a winding one, it is fruitful to study the production of profiling acceptability within the Public Employment Service (PES), and upstream of

The European Union (EU) has recently introduced the Deforestation Regulation to close regulatory gaps in the sustainability and legality of global forest and agricultural commodity supply chains. We analyze this regulatory policy change by drawing on accountability scholarship and institutionalist theories of regulation. Our results show that the Regulation aims to enhance corporate accountability

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds are among the fastest-growing investment styles. ESG investing thereby has a governing effect, and a key open question is whether ESG merely reduces risks for investors or whether it can have a sustainability impact and actively contribute to climate transition. This governance through ESG is characterized by three potential transmission mechanisms:

In recent years, binding regulations in the “home states” of corporations have emerged mainly in the Global North with the aim of holding corporations accountable for human rights and environmental impacts throughout their supply chains. However, we still need a better understanding about to what extent such regulations contribute to enhance “foreign corporate accountability (FCA).” This article introduces

This paper presents a systematic empirical study of the causal mechanisms of regulatory capture. It applies process-tracing methods to the Vioxx drug scandal that was widely regarded to be a result of capture. In doing so, this paper provides a robust empirical analysis of regulatory capture lacking in the current literature. The analysis focuses on the role of the UK drug regulator in licensing and

Industrialized economies in the EU depend heavily on imports of minerals. The extraction and parts of the transport and processing of these minerals take place in the Global South and often bear high human rights and environmental risks. A lack of traceability in mineral supply chains makes it particularly difficult to hold companies accountable for negative environmental and social impacts of their

There is growing scholarly interest in analyzing changes in policies, laws, and regulations. Some concepts depart from the goal of identifying changes in policy substance. Other contributions have concentrated on the structural characteristics of laws and regulations containing these substantive changes. Extracting measures of policy substance from legislative texts is a challenging and time-consuming

Principal-agent theorizing is based on the idea of a linear inverse relationship between principal control and agency slack: the higher the control over the agent, the less likely is the agent to slack. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by explicitly taking the varying nature of agents into account. While control may reduce the agent's room for maneuver, it does not explain the extent to

Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a digital form of fiat currency. CBDC has the potential to be a game challenger in the international financial system, bringing increased complexities arising from technology and regulatory considerations, as well as generating greater currency competition. As more states begin exploring CBDC, the interactions between actors may lead to the emergence of a new

The implementation of international human right treaties is particularly challenging, especially when they entail obligations that apply at the subnational level. In this article, we examine how international law intermediaries translate and use international treaties in subnational policymaking processes. We develop a dedicated analytical framework, and we derive a typology, characterizing different

To examine how private regulatory governance reproduces a market logic that always already circumscribes possibilities for radical change, we tarry with Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality and his writings on power. We focus on two major initiatives created to regulate gold supply chains, subjecting their publicly released documents to a discourse analysis. This reveals subtle but tangible

Many scholars predict that European integration will foster adversarial legalism in Europe. In this article, I empirically assess the Eurolegalism thesis by examining EU regulatory mandates in the competition and securities fields, two policy areas where adversarial legalism is seen as most likely to develop. I argue that the diffusion of adversarial legalism to Europe has faced significant political

With increasingly frequent emergencies related to pandemics, climate change, or any other as yet unforeseen disaster, it is imperative to develop our understanding of how opportunistic legislation and policy grabs may appear even in democracies. Circumventing a lengthy process of public debate and government regulation, declaration of emergency may be conducive to such opportunism. Underlying mechanisms

This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the emergent modes for greening electricity governance through agencification in the Global South by examining the drivers and role of renewable energy agencies (REAs) in various countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Furthermore, the article illustrates the impact of this form of agencification on the deployment of renewables and

The debate on corporate climate accountability has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Several countries, particularly in the Global North, have adopted mandatory human rights and/or environmental due diligence legislation. At the same time, judicial and quasi-judicial proceedings are helping to shape the contours of corporate climate accountability. This article considers how litigation

Regulatory discretion is a central concept in the study of the regulatory state. Yet little attention has been paid to the origins of regulatory discretion, and how it varies across polities, policy areas, and over time. This paper presents a conceptualization of regulatory discretion that draws on three dimensions: delegation, content, and procedure. It argues that to measure regulatory discretion

Celebrity is a form of policy influence that can occur under distinctive circumstances. This paper draws on the regulatory/policy capture literature to develop a model of celebrity capture that explains how interest groups can affect policy in the absence of economic clout or constituency mobilization. We posit that the likelihood of celebrity capture increases when several factors align: (1) a context

Lobbying has never been as sophisticated, complex, and well-funded as it is today. Significantly, interest group strategies are more advanced than the regulatory practices meant to contain them. This raises concerns about states' ability to resist unwanted influence from interest groups. How can government regulations be brought up to speed to address 21st-century lobbying practices? We argue that

In its AI Act, the European Union chose to understand trustworthiness of AI in terms of the acceptability of its risks. Based on a narrative systematic literature review on institutional trust and AI in the public sector, this article argues that the EU adopted a simplistic conceptualization of trust and is overselling its regulatory ambition. The paper begins by reconstructing the conflation of “trustworthiness”

Even though workplace conditions worldwide are subject to local and international laws, labor conditions in global supply chains have continuously raised human rights concerns. In response to societal pressure, multinationals have taken on a certain degree of responsibility regarding workplace conditions in supplier factories, notably by adopting codes of conduct. Investigating the impact of this self-regulatory

This study finds that the greater the pressure of regional competition, the more likely auditors are to issue aggressive audit reports that could damage audit quality. This phenomenon exists mainly in the increasing number of small audit offices in the same region. However, the increasing number of local Big 6 audit offices positively impacts audit quality. Furthermore, individual interviews and penalties

This article reviews the vibrant literature on policy growth in political science and adjacent disciplines, thus offering a conceptual framework for situating past and future research efforts and facilitating the engagement between them. The first part presents important concepts that capture policy growth or aspects of it (rule growth, policy layering, policy mixes, policy accumulation, policyscapes

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, citizens' compliance with government preventive measures was one of the top policy priorities for governments worldwide. This study engages with socio-legal and psychological theories on compliance and proposes an analytical framework to explore the role of different psychological factors on individual-level compliance during global health crises. Using the results of three

Focusing on 23 greening measures, this paper systematically compares the greening efforts of the busiest container and cargo ports in the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). We move beyond accounts for general environmental differences between the EU and the US to examine how specific environmental decisions are shaped by the effects of regulatory characteristics in each region. We identify

US regulatory agencies have been encouraged to consider the equity and distributional impacts of regulations for decades. This paper examines the extent to which such analysis is done and provides recommendations for improving it. We analyze 189 regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) that monetize at least some benefits and costs prepared by a variety of agencies from October 2003 to January 2021. We find

This paper estimates the impact of reforming competition authorities on perceived antitrust effectiveness using methods of causal inference. We study how 20 countries reformed their competition authorities in depth between 1995 and 2020, and what has been the outcome of such reforms in the perceived competition policy effectiveness by the business community compared with 18 control countries in a balanced

Reputation scholars in the field of regulation tend to focus on the strategic nature—or: “agency”—of reputation management. We know fairly little about the precise nature of the dynamics and conflicts between structural and agential factors that are experienced by regulators in practice, and how these dynamics impact reputation management and its outcomes. This study addresses these questions, using

The insurance as governance literature focuses on the ability of private enterprises to collectively regulate, pool, and distribute risks. This paper analyzes how governments support insurance markets to maintain insurability and limit risks to society. We propose a new conceptual framework grouping government interventions into three dimensions: regulation of risky activity, public investment in risk

Despite the salience of transparency in policy and democracy debates a global measurement of transparency has always been missing. It its absence, measuring the impact of transparency on accountability and corruption for a large number of countries has been difficult, with scholars using more or less adequate proxies. This paper introduces a new measurement of real transparency—the T-index—using 14

Regulatory failure caused by overlapping regulations is ubiquitous, with examples in all jurisdictions across a range of disciplines. Overlapping regulation can be problematic. It obscures policy objectives and hinders the development of effective and clear regulation. In addition, regulatory overlap can inflict real costs on businesses through repetitive inspections and data collection efforts. It

Unbiased conduct is an essential part of the social contract between the state and its citizens. Yet, when tasked with settling disputes between citizens and other state officials, are public administrators truly impartial in their resolutions? Such a question is vital for street-level bureaucrats whom the public perceives as the face of governance. This study investigates the relations between the

This article makes important contributions to governance research by studying the implementation of policies with high potential for goal incongruence between intermediaries and regulators. Building on a regulatory intermediation framework and prevailing theories from organizational institutionalism, we propose an original typology that classifies intermediaries' strategies for coping with challenging

Following a long-standing and highly contested policy debate, in June 2021, the German parliament passed the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act requiring mandatory due diligence (MDD) of large companies, holding them accountable for the impacts of their supply chain operations abroad. Applying the discursive agency approach and using evidence from policy documents and 21 interviews with key stakeholders

This article analyzes whether, and if so, why, national inspectorates adopt different enforcement strategies when controlling the provision of welfare services, such as health care, eldercare, and the compulsory school. The findings show that the Swedish Schools Inspectorate uses a predominantly strict strategy, while the Health and Social Care Inspectorate relies on a more situational strategy. To

Government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in the Nordic states—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—exhibit similarities and differences. This article investigates the extent to which crisis policymaking diverges from normal policymaking within the Nordic countries and whether variations between the countries are associated with the role of expertise and the level of politicization. Government

In the recent past, European states have adopted mandatory due diligence (MDD) laws for holding companies accountable for the environmental and human rights impacts of their supply chains. The institutionalization of the international due diligence norm into domestic legislation has, however, been highly contested. Our contribution analyzes the discursive struggles about the meaning of due diligence

Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non-personalized

The need to better balance the promotion of scientific and technological innovation with risk management for consumer protection has inspired several recent reforms attempting to make regulations more flexible and adaptive. The pharmaceutical sector has a long, established regulatory tradition, as well as a long history of controversies around how to balance incentives for needed therapeutic innovations

Nordic countries are known for having extensive welfare services, a highly compressed wage structure owing to strong social partners, as well as effective regulation and governance in public administration. Various typologies capture aspects of the institutional features of families of nations across various policy areas, showing that there is a specific Nordic variant of political economy. While there

This paper investigates the regulation of publicly organized early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Denmark and Sweden, through the regulatory welfare state (RWS) framework. The analysis focuses on how alterations in funding and quality of care are shaped by governmental and nongovernmental actors at national and local levels of government. Through focused structured analysis, we examine how

This article addresses the issue of renewing a sense of vocation in finance. Drawing on experiences in the UK, Australia, and Ireland, three common law jurisdictions at various phases of developing “an ethical esprit de corps” to professionalize the banking industry, it argues that adopting some aspects of a profession, a “trajectory towards professionalization” of the banking industry, could serve

We inform our readers that we have found an article in our pages, Capano and Pritoni (2020), to have sentences of identical text to an article published by the same authors in another journal (Capano et al. 2020). The overlap is considered by the Editors to be minor. We have reproduced the overlapping text below with the appropriate citation to the Journal of Public Policy article:

Many voluntary sustainability standards govern opaque environmental and social issues, which are difficult to understand and address. Extant studies show mixed evidence around the effectiveness of such standards. We develop a theoretical framework that relates different degrees and types of opacity to standard effectiveness. Systemic opacity results from issues embedded in complex, diverse, and dynamic