POLREG · The Politicised Regulatory State: Rationing Public Service Provision in Advanced Democracies

POLREG, hosted by Sciences Po’s Centre d’études européennes et de politique compare, provides a comparative analysis on the processes of, and the conditions for, the evolution of independent regulators designed to “depoliticise” public policy issues. While the creation of such bodies has raised the question of their compatibility with democratic politics, little is known about to what extent and how these institutions withstand the pressure to “politicise” the issues after their creation. POLREG address this gap by examining how and under what conditions independent regulators are likely to prove stable. It focuses on rationing, i.e. the restriction of public service provision, a crucial test for the durability of regulators facing political pressures. POLREG develops a theoretical framework for the political struggles over the maintenance of regulatory institutions; it assesses the utility of the framework through a cross-sectoral, cross-national comparative research design, by examining the evolution of rationing regulation in the healthcare, housing, and energy sectors in England, France and Japan in the past three decades. Combining the original datasets of the politicisation of regulation and policy responses with qualitative data such as documents and interviews, it provides a fine-grained analysis of regulatory trajectories. Through the analysis POLREG seeks to advance a more nuanced understanding of the implication of independent regulators for democratic politics. Challenging the prevailing notion that assume a linear trajectory of depoliticised regulators, it seeks to highlight how sectoral and national contexts shape the divergent pathways of regulatory politics. The project’s outputs are presented as three journal article manuscripts, a book proposal, international conference presentations, and the organisation of international workshops involving both academics and policy-makers.