Regulatory Revolution by Surprise: On the Citadels of Regulatory Capitalism and the Rise of Regulocracy 5 September 20005 David Levi-Faur1, Jacint Jordana2 and Fabrizio Gilardi3 Work in Progress Paper prepared for the 3rd ECPR Conference, Budapest 8-10 September 2005, Section 3: “Regulation in the Age of Governance”. 1 Department of Political Science, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel 31900, Tel: 972-4-8240025, Fax: 972-4-8257785, Email
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[email protected] 3 Institute d'Etudes Politiques et Internationales, Universite de Lausanne -- BFSH2 1015 LAUSANNE, Switzerland, Phone: +41/21/692.31.48 Fax: +41/21/692.31.45 E-mail:
[email protected] Regulatory Revolution by Surprise: On the Citadels of Regulatory Capitalism and the Rise of Regulocracy Abstract The era of privatization is also the era of regulation – a paradoxical assertion since privatization and the family of policies that were associated with it were supposed to lead to deregulation and freer markets. Yet, national and sectoral variations aside, the general trend is towards ‘regulatory explosion’. A quarter of century after the launch of the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions, we conclude that the new economic order involves all but deregulation and indeed may be best described as “regulatory capitalism”. We maintain that the evidence of a regulatory explosion requires us to abandon the zero-sum assumptions that characterize much of the literature on regulatory institutions and strategies in favor of a positive-sum paradigm.