This volume examines regulatory trends and political control of the regulatory process in seven major areas: antitrust, banking and securities, telecommunication, environmental protection, occupational safety and health, consumer products, and energy.

The third edition of Contemporary Regulatory Policy brings this classic text completely up to date--reflecting more than a decade of policy changes and including an entirely new chapter on food safety regulation. Beyond their focus on seven key policy arenas, the authors confront the broad problems of partisan polarization and congressional gridlock. They also consider the significance of unilateral policy actions by President Obama and how these initiatives may be vulnerable to change under President Trump. Recognizing that no single theory can sufficiently explain regulatory politics, they offer a comprehensive set of tools for understanding the world of regulatory policy today.

In Regulatory Politics in Transition Marc Eisner argues that to understand fully the importance of regulatory policy we need to survey the critical policy shifts brought about during the Progressive period, the New Deal, and the contemporary period. Eisner adopts a regulatory regime framework to address the combination of policy change and institutional innovation across multiple policies in each period. For each of these periods Eisner examines economic structural changes and the prevailing political economic and administrative theories that conditioned the design of new policies and institutions. Throughout, Eisner adds a valuable historical dimension to the discussion of regulation, by showing how policies and institutions were shaped by particular historical and political circumstances. The new edition examines how the efficiency regime of the 1980s found a new expression in the regulatory reinvention during the Clinton presidency. Moreover, it explores the impact of globalization trends and international regimes upon the politics of regulation and asks whether a new global regime is on the horizon.

Regulatory change is typically understood as a response to significant crises like the Great Depression, or salient events that focus public attention, like Earth Day 1970. Without discounting the importance of these kinds of events, change often assumes more gradual and less visible forms. But how do we ‘see’ change, and what institutions and processes are behind it? In this book, author Marc Eisner brings these questions to bear on the analysis of regulatory change, walking the reader through a clear-eyed and careful examination of: the dynamics of regulatory change since the 1970s social regulation and institutional design forms of gradual change – including conversion, layering, and drift gridlock, polarization, and the privatization of regulation financial collapse and the anatomy of regulatory failure Demonstrating that transparency and accountability – the hallmarks of public regulation – are increasingly absent, and that deregulation was but one factor in our most recent significant financial collapse, the Great Recession, this book urges readers to look beyond deregulation and consider the broader political implications for our current system of voluntary participation in regulatory programs and the proliferation of public-private partnerships. This book provides an accessible introduction to the complex topic of regulatory politics, ideal for upper-level and graduate courses on regulation, government and business, bureaucratic politics, and public policy.

Differences in the form, function, and scope of regulatory policies are traced to differences in social institutions, in the characteristics of the industries being regulated, and in the regulators' objectives and resources.

Subject: The modern regulatory world is crowded with ideas about different regulatory approaches including, among others: performance-based regulation, self-regulation, light-touch regulation, right-touch regulation, safety management systems, 3rd party regulation, co-regulation, prescriptive regulation, risk-based regulation, a harm-reduction approach, problem-solving, and responsive regulation. Are these various terms merely rhetorical, or aspirational? Do they signal the political preferences of the times? Which of them actually affect operations? Professional regulators--along with everyone else in the risk-control business--face a complex array of choices when they design (or redesign) their strategies and structures, programs, work-flows, relationships, and day-to-day operations. What regulators choose to do, and how they choose to do it, greatly affects their effectiveness, as well as the quality of life in a democracy. This book tackles five major design issues that affect all regulators (and can be applied by anyone else in the risk-control business). It demystifies the various labels and vogue prescriptions for regulatory conduct, clarifies the options, and generates a range of distinct ideas about what it might mean to be a "risk-based regulator." Audience: This book is designed primarily for regulatory practitioners, but will be relevant for other professionals whose roles include risk-management and harm-reduction. In the public sector, this includes law-enforcement and public-safety organizations, as well as security and intelligence agencies. In the private sector it includes compliance managers, safety officers and risk-managers. In the not-for-profit sector this includes any organization that takes on, or contributes to, harm-reduction missions. Author: Professor Malcolm K. Sparrow, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has been working with senior officials in regulatory and enforcement agencies for over 30 years. Prior to joining Harvard's faculty in 1988, he served ten years with the British Police Service, rising to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector. He has authored eight other books, including The Regulatory Craft (Brookings, 2000) and The Character of Harms (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He chairs Harvard's Executive Program: "Strategic Management of Regulatory & Enforcement Agencies." Contents: This book is designed, in the context of a pandemic, to substitute for five core lectures/discussions that would normally be delivered face-to-face in executive-level courses and workshops. Professor Sparrow offers these lectures here in a comfortably accessible and conversational style. Each chapter describes a different dimension of choice, inviting readers to assess their own organization's history and habits as a precursor to figuring out whether, looking forward, some adjustment is warranted or desirable. Each chapter contains a collection of "Frequently Asked Questions" reflecting practitioners' common queries about the concepts presented, and ends with a "Diagnostic Exercise" (a set of probing questions) that readers can use, perhaps with colleagues in a book-group, to apply the analysis in their own setting. Online Teaching: Individual chapters can be assigned as "asynchronous study assignments" for courses on regulatory practice. Students, feeling "all screened out," may appreciate the availability of the paperback edition.