The Future of the Regulatory State: Adaptation, Transformation or Demise?

Abstract

This short paper is meant to provide for some background ideas to motivate discussions during our workshop. It therefore seeks to make a few short (and hopefully somewhat provocative) points. The idea of the ‘regulatory state’ is one that has occupied social scientists for at least two decades, given the growing interest in the changes of statehood that went hand-in-hand (at least in Western Europe in the late 1980s) with programmes of privatisation and liberalisation. These trends were summarised in Majone’s diagnosis of the ‘rise of the regulatory state’ (Majone 1994, 1996, 1997), at the EU-level (as the European Commission expanded its influence over content given budgetary constraints) and at the national level.