2
CHANGING REGULATORY SYSTEMS
Political science is by and large a conservative discipline; we are
better at explaining why things stay the same than why they change. Studies
of topics as diverse as voting behavior, political culture and political
institutions have produced sophisticated descriptions and explanations of
continuity sometimes (as with the study of party identification) resisting
passionately arguments that major change has occurred.
The study of public policy is no exception to this generalization.
Approaches abound that emphasize the likelihood that there will be
continuity rather than change in public policy. Richard Rose noted the
importance of inheritance before choice in public policy as budgetary and
legal commitments made long ago explain most of what government does
today.
1
The “path dependency” school in comparative policy suggests that
policies in different countries will tend to move further and further apart
once at some critical juncture differing choices are made.
2
This is partly due
1
Richard Rose Inheritance Before Choice in Public Policy (Glasgow: Centre for Public
Policy, University of Strathclyde, 1989.)
2
Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier: Shaping the Political Arena: Critical junctures,
the Labor Movement and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton
university press, 1991: James Mahoney “Uses of Path Dependency in Historical
Sociology” Theory and Society 29 (2000) 507-48: Margaret Weir “Ideas and the Politics
of Bounded Innovation” in Sven Steinmo, Katherine Thelen and Frank Longstreth (eds.)
Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (New York:
Cambridge University press, 1992) pp 188-211: Paul Pierson Dismantling the Welfare
State: Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.) For a critical discussion of path dependency see
Adam Sheingate The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State: Institutions and Interest
Group Power in the United States, France and Japan (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001.) For an argument that Thatcher at least hacked back the British
welfare state more than Pierson suggests, see Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens
Convention