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Economic Governance under New Labour: Negotiated Rule-Making, a New
Corporatism, or Consultation Fatigue?
Alistair Howard
Ph.D. Candidate, George Washington University
Visiting Instructor, Temple University
## email not listed ##
Paper prepared for presentation at the
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
Chicago, September 3, 2004
British Politics Group Panel 2:
Changes in the Constitution, Policy, and Policymaking Under Blair
In this paper I discuss economic policy making at Labour’s Department of Trade
and Industry between 1997 and 2003. I assess the relevance of three notions raised
during dissertation research on British corporate governance. Each of the terms—
‘negotiated rule-making,’ ‘corporatism,’ and ‘consultation fatigue’—were used by
participants to describe Labour’s policymaking. They imply alternative interpretations of
economic governance. The first is that ministers and civil servants seek meaningful
participation and consensus on the details of rules they want implemented. The second is
that the Government has reinvigorated corporatism by delegating its purposes and
decision-making to private, non-democratic entities. The third is that Labour ministers
have exhausted the goodwill of participant interests in endless rounds of consultation that
are, at best, a means of legitimating policy and, at worst, a smokescreen for inaction.
My purpose is not to develop or apply a typology of policy making, but rather to
stimulate discussion by suggesting which, if any, of these views is sustainable for the
policy domain of corporate governance. I approach this by sketching both process and
decision for important instances of corporate governance regulation since 1997. I argue
that it is the third interpretation that is most sustainable. There has been some non-
routinized negotiation between those affected by policy, especially in the cases of
accounting regulation and EU directive on employees. But wider consultation does not
appear to have changed the content of policy, which favors investors while doing
minimal damage to managerial autonomy. Nor has Labour delegated to private entities as
much as previous governments. It is true that the Government is very close to individual
businesspeople. There are still corporatist elements in governance regulation, but the
trend is towards greater state influence in the post-Enron period. This has been
associated with a plethora of consultations, which appear chiefly designed to serve the
twin goals of legitimation and procrastination.
I proceed as follows: after explaining corporate governance, I give a brief
overview of UK public policy making and explain the concepts I want to discuss in the
paper. I then offer two-three paragraph summaries of several instances of governance
policymaking. Finally, I summarize and conclude. The paper is based on my doctoral
research into corporate governance policy since 1989 (Howard 2004).
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