Structured to Fail?
Regulatory Performance under Competing Mandates

This book employs a diverse set of research methods to confront widely accepted principles of regulatory agency design.

Christopher Carrigan (Author)

9781316632802, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 June 2017

336 pages
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.7 cm, 0.48 kg

'Carrigan has … offered a hypothesis ready for empirical inquiry, and one that regulatory scholars are well advised to take up. The contemporary political context suggests that such research stands to make theoretically meaningful and substantively crucial contributions.' David P. Carter, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

In the search for explanations for three of the most pressing crises of the early twenty-first century (the housing meltdown and financial crisis, the Gulf oil spill, and the nuclear disaster at Fukushima), commentators pointed to the structure of the regulatory agencies charged with overseeing the associated industries, noting that the need to balance competing regulatory and non-regulatory missions undermined each agency's ability to be an effective regulator. Christopher Carrigan challenges this critique by employing a diverse set of research methods, including a statistical analysis, an in-depth case study of US regulatory oversight of offshore oil and gas development leading up to the Gulf oil spill, and a formal theoretical discussion, to systematically evaluate the benefits and concerns associated with either combining or separating regulatory and non-regulatory missions. His analysis demonstrates for policymakers and scholars why assigning competing non-regulatory missions to regulatory agencies can still be better than separating them in some cases.

1. Linking regulatory failures to organizational design
Part I. Examining the Performance of Multiple-Purpose Regulators: 2. Isolated effects or widespread dysfunction?
3. Appealing to goal ambiguity to explain performance
Part II. Assessing the Role of Regulatory Agency Design in the Gulf Oil Disaster: 4. Balancing conflict and coordination at MMS: 5. Politics and offshore oil and gas policy
Part III. A Theory of Multiple-Purpose Regulators: 6. Policy context and the political choice to combine purposes
7. Operations, organization, politics, and policy context
Appendix A. Additional description and analyses for chapters 2 and 3
Appendix B. Mathematical context, derivations, and proofs for chapter 6.

Subject Areas: Economics [KC], Public administration [JPP], Politics & government [JP]