Companies increasingly adopt internal norms to enhance compliance with legal rules. However, the rapid growth in volume and complexity of such internal rules may obstruct employee knowledge and understanding of such internal rules, and therefore also their compliance. The present study seeks to understand whether shorter and more accessible formats of internal company norms will yield better knowledge

COVID‐19 amplified the issue of public resistance to government vaccination programs. Little attention has focused on people's moral reasons for noncompliance, which differ from—but often build upon—the epistemic claims they make about vaccine safety and efficacy, disease severity, and the trustworthiness of government. This study explores the drivers of noncompliance with the COVID‐19 vaccination

We perform bibliometric analysis on documents for 255 Regulatory Impact Analyzes (RIAs) prepared by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 1980 through 2024. Using a series of automated information extraction methods, we extract references from these documents and match them to bibliographic records. We then build a database of relevant articles (whether cited in an RIA or not) and fit a

Recent literature calls for scholars to bridge the divide that has emerged between criminology and regulation and governance. In the current work, we propose that criminological opportunity theories provide one fruitful pathway to that end. Specifically, we introduce the notion of regulatory guardianship based on the concepts of guardians, guardian capability, and guardian willingness to intervene

Assigning the preparation of decisions to specialized committees composed of member state representatives is a widespread response to the ‘governor's dilemma’, that is, the tension between competence and control, in international organizations (IOs). We theorize a causal mechanism referring to self‐selection and agenda‐setting effects and show how the resulting division of labor among IO bodies produces

Emerging technologies pose many new challenges for regulation and governance on a global scale. With the advent of distributed communication networks like the Internet and decentralized ledger technologies like blockchain, new platforms emerged, disrupting existing power dynamics and bringing about new claims of sovereignty from the private sector. This special issue addresses a gap in the literature

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Although political economy (PE) has long engaged with environmental issues, climate change has remained at the margins of the field until very recently. This article argues that fully addressing the transformative challenges brought up by climate change requires a fundamental rethinking of core PE concepts related to the state, distributional struggles, economic growth, varieties of capitalism, and

New governance models increasingly employ self‐regulation tools like pledges and nudges to achieve regulatory compliance. These approaches premise that voluntary compliance emerges from intrinsic motivation to cooperate rather than coercive measures. Central to their success is trust—both in government institutions and among citizens. However, rising societal polarization raises critical questions

Skills formation is a pressing issue for middle‐income countries given the pace of technological change. In Latin America, scholars point to the hierarchical type of capitalism and its segmentalist skills formation system as the main roadblocks to exiting the middle‐income trap. Yet we contend that focusing on national models of capitalism is limited because they do not explain within‐country variations

Given the ongoing climate crisis, the frequency and severity of natural disasters are increasing. These events result in enormous reconstruction costs, pose a high burden on state budgets, and potentially drive homeowners into private insolvency. One policy instrument for collectively covering such costs is a compulsory insurance scheme for natural hazards. As the impact of natural disasters is uneven

Though often framed as a technocratic tool, impact assessment is a core element of the political agenda‐setting process. In this article, we show that decisions about what is subject to legislative debate are made during impact assessment; specifically, during the drafting of the assessment report. Using a social process tracing methodology, we analyze the removal from the agenda of provisions for

How do provisions for administrative sanctioning affect the implementation of loose legal norms? To streamline regulation, governments have increased their penal capacity by authorizing administrative sanctioning, and they have decentralized regulatory responsibility by loosening legal norms. A case study of Norway's animal welfare governance shows how using administrative sanctions to enforce loose

Decarbonization forces societies to cope with the restructuring and outright unwinding of assets, firms, workers, industries, and regions. We argue that this problem has created legitimacy for industrial policies managing the reallocation of resources. We illustrate this dynamic by documenting incremental state‐building in the European Union, an administration institutionally tilted toward regulatory

The crisis of climate change threatens the existence of human civilization. As social scientists, we should be positioned to theorize and study whether or not the existing system of global capitalism can find ways to ameliorate the crisis or is doomed to cause that collapse because of the overwhelming power of dominant economic interests. This paper argues that right now our dominant theories of capitalism

In the past decades, scholars have provided novel insights on the role of media within regulation. Still, this strand of research has received less attention to the networked nature of contemporary regulatory governance. This article studies surrogate inspectorates, who focus on motivating the implementation/enforcement of regulatory rules, often temporary and without formal capacity. Based on a quantitative

The idea of a “green economy” is one of the latest attempts to bridge the environment and development aims, with a focus on economic growth that makes it appealing to countries that still see a significant development gap to make up. Yet the green economy—most often studied in the Global North and made the target of explicit policy initiatives there, often with substantial public and private resources—also

Investor‐driven climate governance (ICG) is premised on mobilizing finance to address climate change by leveraging investors to pressure companies to reduce emissions. Examining the rapid growth of ICG from an institutional political economy perspective, we argue that powerful financial and regulatory actors with varied interests coalesced to promote the discourse that climate risks equal financial

Despite decades of awareness, societies have failed to adequately respond to climate change, as evidenced by rising CO2 emissions and the continued dominance of fossil fuels in global energy consumption. This failure underscores the structural constraints of capitalist modernity, where economic and political incentives, as well as consumer behaviors, obstruct effective climate action. Beyond the challenge

This article pursues two objectives. First, it aims to trace the genealogy of data protection regulation in major liberal democracies. To do so, it examines the evolution of this regulation in the United States, France, and Germany, among others, and relies on the policy actors' triangle framework. Second, the article provides an explanation for the paradox that emerges from this diachronic analysis:

Secrecy jurisdictions play a crucial role in the legal framework perpetuating climate change. This paper demonstrates how these jurisdictions sustain the dynamics of climate change by enabling capital accumulation rooted in environmental degradation. A regulatory approach to law and climate change must address the global nature of the legal structure that upholds exploitative and ecocidal social relationships

The budget is the outcome of bargaining between spenders and guardians. Most research on budgeting sees all spenders as a unitary actor. This article argues, instead, that there are different relations at play between guardians and each spending ministry. Based on a comparison between four social ministries in Israel, it shows that these relations differ in terms of the level of involvement of guardians

This paper explores the nature of governance both within and by blockchains and the economies they support. There is a widespread assumption that the proper governance model for these economies is political. In this paper, I make an alternative claim, namely that a more accurate model for blockchain governance is as a species of corporate governance. Political and corporate governance are similar,

While outsourcing of public services is today widespread, maintaining their quality remains a challenge. External inspections are seen as essential for overseeing private providers, yet their effectiveness has not been thoroughly investigated. This study evaluates the impact of pre‐scheduled inspections on the performance of private and publicly operated prisons in England and Wales between 2004 and

Blockchain treasuries are pools of cryptocurrency earmarked for funding goods and services within a blockchain ecosystem, such as protocol upgrades. Blockchain participants, such as users and developers, face a trust problem in ensuring that the treasury is robust to opportunism, such as theft or misappropriation of the assets. Treasury governance structures, such as committees or stakeholder voting

Theory and case studies suggest that emergencies and disasters increase corruption, especially in public procurement, hampering relief and reconstruction efforts. Despite a growing interest in the topic, including in research, there is still little systematic evidence about these effects, their structure and trajectories. We set out to investigate the medium‐term impact of disasters on corruption risks

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This paper examines expertise and professional diversity within new (agencies and central banks) and traditional (ministries) regulatory bodies (RBs) and assesses their effect on the perceived competence of RBs. In particular, we address the following research questions: To what extent do members of RBs have expertise and display diversity in terms of their professional trajectories? How do expertise

Why do states subsidize unprofitable industries? This paper applies the Programmatic Action Framework and adapts it to neocorporatist settings to uncover the political determinants of industrial policies. Empirically, it explores how a longstanding coalition of economic, administrative and political actors has maintained public funding for the sugarcane agro‐industry in French overseas departments

This article focuses on the roles of insiders or outsiders in order to theorize the role that human agents play in systems change. It asks: (1) what strengths and weaknesses do insiders and outsiders have respectively as agents of change; and (2) what strategies are available to use these insights to increase, or to limit, the prospects of significant and lasting change? Drawing on an interdisciplinary

Against the background of the European decarbonization strategy, this study examines the extent to which the expansion of renewable energies can lead to tensions with the social and ecological dimensions of the sustainability concept. The study is based on qualitative interviews with 66 experts conducted in the trinational metropolitan region of the Upper Rhine in Germany, France, and Switzerland.

Recent studies focus on the issue of authority transfer to supranational institutions. While examining the opportunities and obstacles for expanding the Union's competencies, this literature often overlooks the effects of adopting ambitious policies on their implementation modes. This paper argues that the costs associated with the expansion of EU authority and opportunities for blame‐shifting drive

Conflicts of Interest The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Research on policy accumulation established the hypothesis about a creeping divergence between implementation burdens and implementation capacity. This paper revisits this hypothesis using improved measures of implementation burden. Using official data on administration and enforcement costs, it finds that policy accumulation does raise implementation stress within the German Statutory Pension Insurance

As private asset‐based welfare like funded occupational pension schemes gain importance, legitimacy concerns arise due to financial market downturns and low investment returns. This paper assesses their input legitimacy by distinguishing between individual‐direct and collective‐representative input possibilities in decision‐making processes. We argue that individual‐direct input possibilities decrease

This memoir describes the 40‐year unfolding, project by project, of my sociolegal field research on legal and regulatory processes. It provides brief accounts of my interactions and interviews with regulatory officials and with businesspeople responsible for regulatory compliance. It also describes my ventures into the cross‐national comparison of legal and regulatory institutions and the political

Effective cyber incident response and crisis management increasingly relies on the coordination of relevant actors at supranational levels. A polycentric governance structure is one of the institutional arrangements that can promote active participation of involved actors, an aspect decisive for the rapid and effective response to cyber incidents and crises. This research aims to dissect whether, and

Large, listed companies are under increasing pressure to respond to critical issues such as climate change, modern slavery, and the protection of First Nations' heritage. Much of this pressure is exerted by civil society actors through corporate governance mechanisms, including leveraging shareholder rights to lobby firms. At the heart of this process sit largely understudied actors, proxy advisors

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Scholarship on the administration of international organizations (IOs) has extensively discussed how autonomy influences their performance. While some argue that autonomy increases performance through greater adaptability, others warn that it may increase the risk of agency slack. Authors typically distinguish between three types of performance: output, outcome, and impact performance. We focus on

In recent years, many countries have adopted biodiversity offset policies to internalize the ecological impacts of land developments. Although national policies share the general principle of equalizing ecological harm with gain, there is substantial variation across programs regarding the institutional forms governing offsetting. In this paper, we compare biodiversity governance in the United States

How can polycentric governance promote the development of ecosocial policies within existing policy systems? Through a study of green reforms of Danish vocational education, the paper argues that polycentric governance institutions are particularly useful at engaging constituent actors in innovation and constructive collaboration over reforming education programs to integrate ecological goals into

Trust is a key resource in financial transactions. Traditional financial institutions, and novel blockchain‐based decentralized financial (DeFi) services rely on fundamentally different sources of trust and confidence. The former relies on heavy regulation, trusted intermediaries, clear rules (and restrictions) on market competition, and long‐standing informal expectations on what banks and other financial

The governance turn in political research has led to increased attention to informal institutions. For scholars of international relations this has contributed to recent scholarship that reveals a notable growth in the number of informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs). Many aspects of IIGOs remain unknown, including whether they involve transnational actors (TNAs). Yet, whether IIGOs are open

How can decarbonization governance endure under increasing geoeconomic distress? Global tensions threaten to divert financial and political resources from the green transition toward national security issues. However, we lack the analytical tools to assess decarbonization governance in this age of global rivalries. To address this gap, we develop an analytical framework to study the effects of geoeconomic

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) adopted in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic marks an important departure in European Union (EU) governance, as it introduces an innovative “demand‐driven, performance‐based” model aimed at overcoming the limitations of past policies seeking to promote national reforms. In this study, we set out the theoretical assumptions underlying the RRF governance model

In large and complex human groups, social rules reduce individuals' uncertainty about their own choice set, including through these rules' simultaneous influence on the choice set of other individuals. But uncertainty varies as to the extent to which it is knowable and quantifiable ex ante. Therefore, different classes of social rules deal with the future uncertainty of individuals' conduct in structurally

As scholars race to address the climate crisis, they have often treated the problem as sui generis and have only rarely sought to learn from prior efforts to make industrial operations greener. In this paper, we consider what can be learned from other shifts away from polluting substances. Drawing on literatures on corporate regulatory strategies and evolving regulatory interactions, we argue for a

Scholars of the US regulatory process routinely assert that rulemaking is “ossified”—that it has become so encumbered with procedural constraints that it is difficult for agencies to issue socially desirable regulations. Yet, this claim has rarely been subject to empirical testing, and this is particularly true at the sub‐federal (i.e., US state) level. But the same factors that allegedly cause ossification

How do citizens perceive labor market risks related to digitalization and the green transition, and how do these risk perceptions translate into preferences for social policies? We address these questions in this paper by studying the policy preferences of individual workers on how governments should deal with the two labor market challenges of digitalization and the green transition. Employing novel

A regulatory sandbox is an emerging tool for addressing the challenges posed by the FinTech industry, but countries have embraced it to varying degrees. There is a need to systematically examine the question: Which factors explain the diverging trajectories in countries' decision to use (or not use) this instrument? This paper examines the adoption of regulatory sandboxes for FinTech in the Baltic

Since the 1990s, the EU has attempted to create a common electricity market. However, EU legislators are unsatisfied by the results. We argue that differentiated implementation of directives over time creates path dependencies that entrench national differences. The actor constellation of parties and incumbent operators at the beginning of the liberalization path determines how well countries implement

This article reviews recent insights from the blooming Comparative Political Economy (CPE) literature on climate change with the aim to demonstrate the importance of integrating climate change into the field of CPE and to highlight the contributions of CPE to our understanding of the social and political obstacles to effective climate policies. In addition, we advance two key points to bring the CPE

Citizen trust in regulatory agencies is essential for the functioning of society and markets. Trust in regulatory agencies promotes compliance and strengthens trust in regulated sectors. Despite its importance, there is no systematic study on how trust is in this context can be measured best. In response, this article presents findings of a systematic review of measures of trust in regulatory contexts

Political decisions over economic growth policies influence the degree of bureaucratic autonomy and regulatory governance dynamics. Yet, our understanding of these processes in the Global South is somewhat limited. The article studies the post-Global Financial Crisis period and relies on elite interviews and secondary sources from Turkey. It problematizes how an economic growth model dependent on foreign

Decentralized governance technologies like blockchains are often proposed as substitutes for private legal arrangements like those provided by company law or organizational law more generally. In established legal systems in developed countries, the costs of implementing such algorithmic mechanisms are likely to be greater than the agency or other costs that come from selecting and trusting an existing

This contribution considers the revolution in the concept and practice of trust in corporate governance that first moved from trust in “people” to trust in “compliance,” setting the stage for the digitization of trust measures and the digitalization of compliance. Part One examines the fundamental challenge, one that arises from the near simultaneous shift in cultural expectations about trust from

Freedom of information (FOI) laws empower citizens to access public information from public organizations, enhancing government transparency and accountability. Previous studies have evaluated government transparency and FOI compliance based on the proactive release of information and governments' responses to citizens' requests. This study extends prior research by focusing on regulatory compliance

A considerable amount of work has focused on “regulatory innovation” in the social sciences. This scholarship has conceptually defined certain types of regulatory changes as innovations and explored how regulation, as a policy instrument, alters the pace of technological innovation. More recently, a renewed interest for policy mixes and more dynamism in industrial innovation policies around the world

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