Regulation

Regulation has a variety of meanings that are not reducible to one single concept. In the field of public policy, regulation refers to the promulgation of targeted rules, typically accompanied by some authoritative mechanism for monitoring and enforcing compliance. Accordingly, for a long time in the United States, the study of regulation has been synonymous with the study of the independent agencies enforcing it. In political economy, it refers to the attempt of the state to steer the economy, either narrowly defined as the imposition of economic controls on the behavior of private business or, more broadly, to include other governmental instruments, such as taxation or disclosure requirements. The two meanings share a focus on the state's attempt to intervene in private activities. A third definition moves beyond an interest in the state and focuses on all means of social control, either intentional or unintentional. This understanding is most common in anthropology, sociolegal studies, and international relations because it includes mechanisms such as voluntary agreements or norms that exercise social control outside of the reach of a sovereign state and not necessarily as an intentional act of steering. Thus, different strands of regulation studies share an agreement on the subject of regulation (the state), the object (the behavior of nongovernmental actors), the instruments (an authoritative set of rules), or the domain of application (the economy), but they do not necessarily agree on all of these elements. Especially in its broader meanings, the concept of regulation resembles the concept of governance: It points to the rules that structure the behavior of individuals within a given political context without postulating where these rules come from and how they are imposed.

The diversity of meanings has led to a certain amount of controversy and misunderstandings between scholars, most notably on the topic of deregulation. In the economic tradition, deregulation refers to the elimination of the specific controls that the government imposed on the market interactions, in particular the attempt to control market access, prices, output, or product quality. However, if regulation is conceived of more broadly as a form of economic governance, it is difficult to imagine the total elimination of state intervention. Moreover, the relationship between regulation and competition seems to be transforming. Previously, regulation was depicted as the enemy of free market interactions. Competition necessarily required deregulation. Today, there is a sense that some regulation facilitates competition, while others impede it. Regulation is no longer the antonym of free markets or liberalization, and scholars increasingly prefer using the terms reregulation or regulatory reform instead of deregulation.

The theoretical debates around the concept of regulation reflect different disciplines and research agendas and can be broadly divided into approaches to regulation as an act of government and perspectives on regulation as governance.