{"title":"Polarization and Voluntary Compliance: The Impact of Ideological Extremity on the Effectiveness of Self-Regulation","authors":"Libby Maman, Yuval Feldman, Tom Tyler","doi":"10.1111/rego.70020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70020","url":null,"abstract":"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 about the continued effectiveness of self-regulatory approaches. This paper examines how ideological extremity, a key dimension of polarization, affects cooperation in self-regulatory contexts. We theorize that ideological extremity erodes trust in government and interpersonal trust, thereby diminishing cooperative behavior and threatening self-regulation's viability. Furthermore, we propose that extremity transforms authority dynamics, with ideological orientation and partisan alignment increasingly determining cooperation levels. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and World Value Survey (WVS), we find robust evidence that ideological extremity undermines cooperation through distinct mechanisms across the ideological spectrum. While our data has limitations, our findings have important implications for policymakers implementing self-regulation tools in polarized societies. The results suggest the need to carefully consider how ideological dynamics shape the effectiveness of voluntary compliance mechanisms.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143775964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Hierarchical Capitalism to Developmental Governance: The Emergence of Concerted Skills Formation in Middle-Income Countries","authors":"Aldo Madariaga, Mariana Rangel-Padilla","doi":"10.1111/rego.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70015","url":null,"abstract":"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 <i>segmentalist</i> 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 in highly unequal contexts. That is the case of the emergence of state-business cooperation for skills formation in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, which seems to contradict the national hierarchical pattern. Hence, subnational analysis might uncover alternative pathways. This paper presents a framework for understanding subnational dynamics in middle-income countries, where <i>concerted</i> skills formation systems may emerge. We claim that a combination of external competitive threats and state-led initiatives, like the creation of organizational clusters, can harness business collective action toward coordination in skills formation. To illustrate and further develop our model, we first identify Nuevo León's superior skills availability as well as its state and business associative capacities against the rest of the Mexican states. Next, we conduct a qualitative case study of Nuevo León as a pathway case to process-trace the operation of the hypothesized mechanisms. Our analysis underscores the joint relevance of local state and business associative capacities for skills formation in adverse institutional contexts.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143745372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Taking Eco-Social Risks Seriously: Explaining the Introduction of Compulsory Insurance for Natural Hazards","authors":"Anne-Marie Parth","doi":"10.1111/rego.70019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70019","url":null,"abstract":"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, introducing mandatory insurance regulation has a range of social and financial implications. While some European countries have introduced compulsory schemes, others have adopted different policy responses. Taking this variation as the main puzzle, I consider what factors can explain the introduction of compulsory insurance for natural hazards. Building on public risk and quiet politics literature, I identify several factors and test these against three empirical cases: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This analysis finds that focusing events are necessary for policy change, but the position and power of interest groups, as well as exogenous shocks within the EU context, were also crucial to explaining the introduction, rejection, and even termination of compulsory insurance schemes for natural hazards.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143736954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Well-Being Economy in the Visegrad Countries: Lessons for Degrowth-Oriented Industrial Policy","authors":"Oliver Kovacs, Endre Domonkos","doi":"10.1111/rego.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70014","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a transdisciplinary approach to design future degrowth-oriented industrial policies in pursuing a well-being economy in the case of a specific growth model. Specifically, we show that the case of the Visegrad countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, V4s) is a clarion call for the degrowth literature to be much more modest and self-critical. It addresses the puzzling question of whether the future degrowth policies of the V4s are influenced by their unique industrialization path, which has historically relied on foreign capital. It proposes a transdisciplinary framework (based on political economy and ecological economics) to root degrowth-compatible industrial policies for the degrowth transition. It then analyzes the V4s' capital-dependent growth models historically to improve degrowth-oriented industrial policy research. It concludes with implications for future study on degrowth-oriented industrial policy, based on V4s' experience anticipated to remain in a wayward FDI-dependent mode, to make the well-being economy-seeking endeavor more scientifically sound.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143640752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Impact Assessment as Agenda-Setting: Procedural Politicking and the Mobilization of Bias in the European Union's Audiovisual Media Services Directive","authors":"Eleanor Brooks, Kathrin Lauber","doi":"10.1111/rego.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70016","url":null,"abstract":"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 stronger alcohol advertising rules during the revision of the EU's Audiovisual Media Services Directive. We identify and test three possible explanations for this non-decision, drawing on material not previously in the public domain, and exploring how procedural politicking in the context of the EU's Better Regulation agenda shapes the drafting process. Concluding that the non-decision on alcohol advertising regulation was most likely prompted by combined political pressure from within and outwith the Commission, we argue for greater attention to impact assessment as a tool for mobilizing bias and agenda-setting.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143619010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Administrative Sanctions and Loose Legal Norms: Resistance and Street-Level Policy Reversal in Norway","authors":"Stig S. Gezelius","doi":"10.1111/rego.70011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70011","url":null,"abstract":"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 legal norms led to unpredictable sanctioning and, thereby, subverted regulatees' trust in law enforcement. Ensuing resistance from regulatees pressured inspectors to regain legitimacy by tightening loose legal norms and by backing down on administrative sanctioning. Inspectors thus reversed streamlining policies to protect the primary purpose of their profession: to motivate compliance with animal welfare law. The case highlights unintended consequences of streamlining regulation. It also illustrates how frontline workers may protect their primary purpose by disregarding policies they perceive as disruptive.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143575424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Picking Losers: Climate Change and Managed Decline in the European Union","authors":"Timur Ergen, Luuk Schmitz","doi":"10.1111/rego.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70004","url":null,"abstract":"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 statehood and the making of the Single Market in energy since the 1990s. European greening policies, we argue, have incrementally lessened the primacy of regulatory tools and have introduced a plethora of instruments to accelerate green restructuring and carbon unwinding. Best understood as a process of multi-sited institutional layering, the European Union increasingly appears to complement financial and regulatory instruments to effect green energy transitions with the management of decline in targeted regions and sectors, based on targeted funds and targeted transition planning.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143560613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Climate Politics in Latin America: The Cases of Chile and Mexico","authors":"Isik D. Özel","doi":"10.1111/rego.12662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12662","url":null,"abstract":"This paper focuses on climate coalitions and commitments in the Global South by comparing the cases of two Latin American countries, Chile and Mexico. Chile, once a laggard, emerged as a regional leader in climate policy in the early 2020s, while Mexico, a pioneer until the early 2010s, experienced a backlash and retreated. How can we make sense of these diverging trajectories? How and why do climate commitments emerge? This paper argues that robust commitments are only possible when driven by a bundled narrative that facilitates the formation of a broad coalition. Such a coalition, in turn, crafts and advances the climate narrative, as demonstrated by the Chilean case. By exploring the interplay between climate narrative creation and coalition-building, the paper underscores climate coalitions' fragile and often precarious nature in the Global South. It seeks to contribute to the existing knowledge on climate policy and the formation of climate coalitions, particularly in the Global South, where climate policy challenges are often more intensified than in the Global North.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143545853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pieter E. Stek, Renato Lima-de-Oliveira, Thessa Vasudhevan
{"title":"The Development of Carbon Markets in Upper-Middle-Income Countries","authors":"Pieter E. Stek, Renato Lima-de-Oliveira, Thessa Vasudhevan","doi":"10.1111/rego.70010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70010","url":null,"abstract":"Upper-middle-income economies face a specific set of trade-offs when reducing carbon emissions, which differ from the trade-offs faced in low- and high-income economies. To mobilize domestic funds, middle-income countries are developing carbon markets to attract private sector investment. This study advances a theoretical framework for carbon market development and explores the process in Brazil, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The case of Malaysia is examined in depth due to the slow development of its carbon market compared to its peers. Analysis reveals that Malaysia faces a carbon market dilemma due to high domestic emissions and internal challenges related to energy market regulation and land ownership, which have hindered the emergence of a pro-carbon market coalition. In contrast, Brazil and Indonesia have been more active in the international voluntary carbon market and have implemented key regulations with domestic political support. This study provides insights into the challenges and opportunities of carbon market development in middle-income economies, highlighting the importance of resource endowments and an enabling coalition for successful implementation.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143545856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Political Economy and Climate Change","authors":"Neil Fligstein","doi":"10.1111/rego.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70009","url":null,"abstract":"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, fail to give us sufficient leverage to understand how and if the energy transition will happen. This suggests we urgently need new approaches which center on mechanisms of economic and political innovation and change in order to evaluate if such a transition is under way and how large its impact might be. The paper concludes with a research agenda focussed on these ideas.","PeriodicalId":21026,"journal":{"name":"Regulation & Governance","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143528345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}