Conflicts of Interest The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Adopted in 2024, the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (EUCS3D, alternatively EUCSDDD) instructs member states to regulate human rights and environmental due diligence across business operations and their global value chains. Businesses started to familiarize themselves with the new directive to develop future compliance strategies. Despite its importance, the familiarization process

In various regulatory settings, firms receive feedback (i.e., firm‐specific private advice) from authorities on how to improve compliance. Although the literature sheds light on the authorities' decision of when to provide feedback, less is known about firms' decisions on how to respond. Building on research on compliance and regulation, we expect a higher level of responsiveness to feedback when the

Even if member states formally comply with EU law, the ‘ideal type’ of literal compliance, where EU rules are compliantly transposed without customizing their density or restrictiveness, is both rare and improbable. Why do EU member states engage in literal compliance in the ‘least likely’ case of the EU's Fiscal Compact, where customized transposition is crucial for member states to ‘regain control’

This paper assesses what type of comments are most useful to what type of stakeholder in gaining influence during public consultations. Theoretically, the paper approaches stakeholders' consultation comments as reputational threats from key audiences that the agency needs to respond to. Different types of threats are expected to carry different weights depending on the type of stakeholders. The analysis

This study investigates the impact of selective good corporate governance practices on the development of mandatory whistleblower protection policies in corporations. Using a coding instrument aligned with legislative requirements, we analyzed 66 whistleblower policies to assess their comprehensiveness and alignment with best practices. The findings reveal that, except for executive gender diversity

The European Commission's decision to expand its 2014 Regulation on electronic identification and trust services toward wallet‐based digital identities marked a significant shift in the governance of users' digital identities. The intersection between private digital services, public prerogatives, and individual self‐determination raises questions of data governance, notably power conflicts over control

Conflicts of Interest The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Amid the COVID‐19 Pandemic, many countries worldwide have resorted to social distancing to maintain a certain physical distance to avoid direct contact between people. Despite the abundant literature on social distancing, how this mode of direct state intervention, which inevitably requires a lot of regulatory resources, was implemented has been a rare source of scientific inquiry. This paper attempts

Regulatory review—assessing the legality, use of evidence, and correct calculation of costs and benefits in regulations before they are enacted—is a core function of regulatory oversight bodies. In principle, reviewing aims to improve the effectiveness of regulations through economic rationality, tools, and methods. In practice, the work of oversight bodies occurs amid the politics of the rulemaking

Companies increasingly adopt internal norms to enhance compliance with legal rules. However, the rapid growth in volume and complexity of such internal rules may obstruct employee knowledge and understanding of such internal rules, and therefore also their compliance. The present study seeks to understand whether shorter and more accessible formats of internal company norms will yield better knowledge

COVID‐19 amplified the issue of public resistance to government vaccination programs. Little attention has focused on people's moral reasons for noncompliance, which differ from—but often build upon—the epistemic claims they make about vaccine safety and efficacy, disease severity, and the trustworthiness of government. This study explores the drivers of noncompliance with the COVID‐19 vaccination

We perform bibliometric analysis on documents for 255 Regulatory Impact Analyzes (RIAs) prepared by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 1980 through 2024. Using a series of automated information extraction methods, we extract references from these documents and match them to bibliographic records. We then build a database of relevant articles (whether cited in an RIA or not) and fit a

Recent literature calls for scholars to bridge the divide that has emerged between criminology and regulation and governance. In the current work, we propose that criminological opportunity theories provide one fruitful pathway to that end. Specifically, we introduce the notion of regulatory guardianship based on the concepts of guardians, guardian capability, and guardian willingness to intervene

Assigning the preparation of decisions to specialized committees composed of member state representatives is a widespread response to the ‘governor's dilemma’, that is, the tension between competence and control, in international organizations (IOs). We theorize a causal mechanism referring to self‐selection and agenda‐setting effects and show how the resulting division of labor among IO bodies produces

Emerging technologies pose many new challenges for regulation and governance on a global scale. With the advent of distributed communication networks like the Internet and decentralized ledger technologies like blockchain, new platforms emerged, disrupting existing power dynamics and bringing about new claims of sovereignty from the private sector. This special issue addresses a gap in the literature

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Although political economy (PE) has long engaged with environmental issues, climate change has remained at the margins of the field until very recently. This article argues that fully addressing the transformative challenges brought up by climate change requires a fundamental rethinking of core PE concepts related to the state, distributional struggles, economic growth, varieties of capitalism, and

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

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 segmentalist 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the past decades, scholars have provided novel insights on the role of media within regulation. Still, this strand of research has received less attention to the networked nature of contemporary regulatory governance. This article studies surrogate inspectorates, who focus on motivating the implementation/enforcement of regulatory rules, often temporary and without formal capacity. Based on a quantitative

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

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

The idea of a “green economy” is one of the latest attempts to bridge the environment and development aims, with a focus on economic growth that makes it appealing to countries that still see a significant development gap to make up. Yet the green economy—most often studied in the Global North and made the target of explicit policy initiatives there, often with substantial public and private resources—also

Investor‐driven climate governance (ICG) is premised on mobilizing finance to address climate change by leveraging investors to pressure companies to reduce emissions. Examining the rapid growth of ICG from an institutional political economy perspective, we argue that powerful financial and regulatory actors with varied interests coalesced to promote the discourse that climate risks equal financial

Despite decades of awareness, societies have failed to adequately respond to climate change, as evidenced by rising CO2 emissions and the continued dominance of fossil fuels in global energy consumption. This failure underscores the structural constraints of capitalist modernity, where economic and political incentives, as well as consumer behaviors, obstruct effective climate action. Beyond the challenge

This article pursues two objectives. First, it aims to trace the genealogy of data protection regulation in major liberal democracies. To do so, it examines the evolution of this regulation in the United States, France, and Germany, among others, and relies on the policy actors' triangle framework. Second, the article provides an explanation for the paradox that emerges from this diachronic analysis:

Lobbying is a multi‐faceted phenomenon that involves interest groups and corporations contacting politicians and officials in order to try to achieve their policy preferences. While interest group policy‐related lobbying has received a great deal of attention, studies of corporate contract lobbying are rarer even though this is a much older phenomenon. The article critically examines the commonly‐held

Secrecy jurisdictions play a crucial role in the legal framework perpetuating climate change. This paper demonstrates how these jurisdictions sustain the dynamics of climate change by enabling capital accumulation rooted in environmental degradation. A regulatory approach to law and climate change must address the global nature of the legal structure that upholds exploitative and ecocidal social relationships

The budget is the outcome of bargaining between spenders and guardians. Most research on budgeting sees all spenders as a unitary actor. This article argues, instead, that there are different relations at play between guardians and each spending ministry. Based on a comparison between four social ministries in Israel, it shows that these relations differ in terms of the level of involvement of guardians

This paper explores the nature of governance both within and by blockchains and the economies they support. There is a widespread assumption that the proper governance model for these economies is political. In this paper, I make an alternative claim, namely that a more accurate model for blockchain governance is as a species of corporate governance. Political and corporate governance are similar,

While outsourcing of public services is today widespread, maintaining their quality remains a challenge. External inspections are seen as essential for overseeing private providers, yet their effectiveness has not been thoroughly investigated. This study evaluates the impact of pre‐scheduled inspections on the performance of private and publicly operated prisons in England and Wales between 2004 and

Blockchain treasuries are pools of cryptocurrency earmarked for funding goods and services within a blockchain ecosystem, such as protocol upgrades. Blockchain participants, such as users and developers, face a trust problem in ensuring that the treasury is robust to opportunism, such as theft or misappropriation of the assets. Treasury governance structures, such as committees or stakeholder voting

Bridging the gap between welfare and climate policies is essential for simultaneously pursuing increased well‐being and reduced carbon emissions. This study uses a policy Delphi approach, involving experts and stakeholders from five European countries: Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Spain, and Sweden, to assess the perceived desirability and feasibility of six eco‐social policies for enabling 1.5°C lifestyles

Theory and case studies suggest that emergencies and disasters increase corruption, especially in public procurement, hampering relief and reconstruction efforts. Despite a growing interest in the topic, including in research, there is still little systematic evidence about these effects, their structure and trajectories. We set out to investigate the medium‐term impact of disasters on corruption risks

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This paper examines expertise and professional diversity within new (agencies and central banks) and traditional (ministries) regulatory bodies (RBs) and assesses their effect on the perceived competence of RBs. In particular, we address the following research questions: To what extent do members of RBs have expertise and display diversity in terms of their professional trajectories? How do expertise

Why do states subsidize unprofitable industries? This paper applies the Programmatic Action Framework and adapts it to neocorporatist settings to uncover the political determinants of industrial policies. Empirically, it explores how a longstanding coalition of economic, administrative and political actors has maintained public funding for the sugarcane agro‐industry in French overseas departments

This article focuses on the roles of insiders or outsiders in order to theorize the role that human agents play in systems change. It asks: (1) what strengths and weaknesses do insiders and outsiders have respectively as agents of change; and (2) what strategies are available to use these insights to increase, or to limit, the prospects of significant and lasting change? Drawing on an interdisciplinary

Against the background of the European decarbonization strategy, this study examines the extent to which the expansion of renewable energies can lead to tensions with the social and ecological dimensions of the sustainability concept. The study is based on qualitative interviews with 66 experts conducted in the trinational metropolitan region of the Upper Rhine in Germany, France, and Switzerland.

Recent studies focus on the issue of authority transfer to supranational institutions. While examining the opportunities and obstacles for expanding the Union's competencies, this literature often overlooks the effects of adopting ambitious policies on their implementation modes. This paper argues that the costs associated with the expansion of EU authority and opportunities for blame‐shifting drive

Conflicts of Interest The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Research on policy accumulation established the hypothesis about a creeping divergence between implementation burdens and implementation capacity. This paper revisits this hypothesis using improved measures of implementation burden. Using official data on administration and enforcement costs, it finds that policy accumulation does raise implementation stress within the German Statutory Pension Insurance

As private asset‐based welfare like funded occupational pension schemes gain importance, legitimacy concerns arise due to financial market downturns and low investment returns. This paper assesses their input legitimacy by distinguishing between individual‐direct and collective‐representative input possibilities in decision‐making processes. We argue that individual‐direct input possibilities decrease

This memoir describes the 40‐year unfolding, project by project, of my sociolegal field research on legal and regulatory processes. It provides brief accounts of my interactions and interviews with regulatory officials and with businesspeople responsible for regulatory compliance. It also describes my ventures into the cross‐national comparison of legal and regulatory institutions and the political

Effective cyber incident response and crisis management increasingly relies on the coordination of relevant actors at supranational levels. A polycentric governance structure is one of the institutional arrangements that can promote active participation of involved actors, an aspect decisive for the rapid and effective response to cyber incidents and crises. This research aims to dissect whether, and

Large, listed companies are under increasing pressure to respond to critical issues such as climate change, modern slavery, and the protection of First Nations' heritage. Much of this pressure is exerted by civil society actors through corporate governance mechanisms, including leveraging shareholder rights to lobby firms. At the heart of this process sit largely understudied actors, proxy advisors

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Scholarship on the administration of international organizations (IOs) has extensively discussed how autonomy influences their performance. While some argue that autonomy increases performance through greater adaptability, others warn that it may increase the risk of agency slack. Authors typically distinguish between three types of performance: output, outcome, and impact performance. We focus on

In recent years, many countries have adopted biodiversity offset policies to internalize the ecological impacts of land developments. Although national policies share the general principle of equalizing ecological harm with gain, there is substantial variation across programs regarding the institutional forms governing offsetting. In this paper, we compare biodiversity governance in the United States

How can polycentric governance promote the development of ecosocial policies within existing policy systems? Through a study of green reforms of Danish vocational education, the paper argues that polycentric governance institutions are particularly useful at engaging constituent actors in innovation and constructive collaboration over reforming education programs to integrate ecological goals into

Trust is a key resource in financial transactions. Traditional financial institutions, and novel blockchain‐based decentralized financial (DeFi) services rely on fundamentally different sources of trust and confidence. The former relies on heavy regulation, trusted intermediaries, clear rules (and restrictions) on market competition, and long‐standing informal expectations on what banks and other financial

The governance turn in political research has led to increased attention to informal institutions. For scholars of international relations this has contributed to recent scholarship that reveals a notable growth in the number of informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs). Many aspects of IIGOs remain unknown, including whether they involve transnational actors (TNAs). Yet, whether IIGOs are open

How can decarbonization governance endure under increasing geoeconomic distress? Global tensions threaten to divert financial and political resources from the green transition toward national security issues. However, we lack the analytical tools to assess decarbonization governance in this age of global rivalries. To address this gap, we develop an analytical framework to study the effects of geoeconomic