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1 Regul. & Governance 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/rgulangnce1 and id is 1 raw text is: 


Regulation & Governance (2007) 1, 1-7


EDITORS' INTRODUCTION


Can regulation and governance make

a  difference?




Regulation and  governance have become  popular  phenomena   for social scientists to
study and  for good reason. Although  redistributive, distributive and developmental
policies still abound, the expanding part of governance is regulation. Indeed, few projects
are more  central to the social sciences than the study of regulation and regulatory
governance. Regulation and the significant issues raised by it have become central to
the work of social scientists from many disciplines - political science, economics, law,
sociology, psychology, anthropology, history and others. Furthermore, the strong inter-
est of other professional and scholarly communities, such as physicians, nutritionists,
biologists, ecologists, geologists, pharmacists and chemists, makes regulatory issues even
more  central to scientists and practitioners who are perplexed by the demands for better,
fairer, more efficient, and more participatory systems of governance.
    We have established this journal to serve the needs of these varied professional and
scholarly communities. We  aim to provide a leading interdisciplinary platform for the
study of regulation and its implications for governance. We seek to bridge and solidify
discussions among  a variety of relevant disciplines, serving the development of core
theoretical and empirical insights in the study of regulation.
    In this editorial introduction, we introduce the new journal first by offering an
avowedly brief history of how interest in regulation has grown across the social science
disciplines in the course of the last century. We then argue that the most recent buildup
of that wave of research interest has coincided with a shift in political studies from an in-
terest in government to governance. Finally, we distinguish regulation from governance and
set out broadly, yet clearly, the intellectual agenda and vision for Regulation & Governance.



Regulation   before  governance

From  the outset, regulation as a subject of social science research grew out of a conver-
gence of many  streams from other fields. The Progressive Era in the USA spawned not
only muck-raking expos6s of the need for new regulatory agencies, but also early schol-
arly contributions that evaluated the new regulatory institutions and the political econo-
my  of the American regulatory state (Cushman  1941; Bernstein 1955; Mitnick 1980).
The  influence of important legal and political innovators, such as Louis D. Brandeis,
President Woodrow  Wilson's chief economic advisor and architect of the Federal Trade
Commission,  stretched from the Progressive Era through to the New Deal.
    The next chapter in regulatory studies opened in the 1960s and 1970s, when the USA
and other developed nations experienced a burst of new forms of consumer, civil rights,
health and safety, and environmental regulation, and with these changes came renewed
interest in regulation (Wilson 1980; Bardach & Kagan 1982). More recently, there has
been a move   away from  treating the USA as the main  arena for regulatory studies,


© 2007 The Authors
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd


doi:10.1111/j.1748-5991.2007.00006.x

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