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Book Review: General Politics: Managing Regulation: Regulatory Analysis, Politics and Policy

This is a well-written and very useful addition to the body of literature on regulation, and is part of Palgrave’s excellent series on public management. The introduction situates the book firmly in the context of ‘the rise of the regulatory state’ (p. 2), taking a thoroughly modern stance on the interface between the state, public regulators and private actors. More importantly, it also argues forcefully for approaching the subject in a more holistic fashion. It challenges the notion of regulation as ‘a technocratic and apolitical process’ (p. 8), and the consequent implication that the ‘exciting’ debates all occur during the preceding legislative phase. Rather, it sets out to expose the many subtle trade-offs, unintended consequences, pressures, problems and remedies that exist in this activity. In short, it encourages the reader to ‘think like a regulator’ (p. 9) – an exercise in which the reader is ably assisted during the remainder of the book. An excellent chapter then lays out four theoretical perspectives on regulation, taking the reader through Stiglerian interest group politics to a more sociological account focusing on ‘ideas and world-views’ (pp. 36–9). From there, the authors deftly cover a series of key theoretical and practical debates: alternatives to command-and-control regulation, difficulties in regulating across borders, and the complexities of managing network industries and handling financial risk. Each chapter explains the complexities of these debates via a series of practical scenarios, and in a refreshing approach Lodge and Wegrich take various examples of regulation, or regulatory shortcomings, and transport them to a fictional realm – ‘Amnesialand’. This alternative reality then suffers a financial crisis, experiences problems in regulating its monopoly water supplier and its prison sector, and so on. The guiding principle (‘thinking like a regulator’) runs through these analytical narratives, helping bring together theory, practical problems and empirical cases. This approach sums up the book’s great strength. For the student of public administration its range and analytical rigour offer very useful entry points into many aspects of regulation. Meanwhile, one can imagine an exasperated professional, wanting to know quite why the regulatory regime she experiences is so ineffective, finding in this book a pithy and engaging explanation; ditto – for the other side of the regulatory fence: the under-resourced and equally exasperated practitioner. For both audiences – the academic and the professional – the fluent tone makes light work of often very complex issues of policy making.