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Explores the logic of basing risk regulation on the interests of cohesive organized groups inside or outside the bureaucracy, including patterns of capture by professions as well as by orthodox producer capture. The chapter explores the extent and conditions in which state regulation of the nine case‐study risks is driven by such forces. Analysis suggests that activity by organized interests has powerful explanatory force and can help explain a number of regime features that are anomolous from market‐failure and opinion‐responsive perspectives, especially when the interests of regulatory professionals are taken into account. Moreover, careful analysis reveals that different regulatory components of the same regime, such as standard‐setting and enforcement, may be shaped by different sets of organized interests.

This chapter considers several matters that complicate the understanding of inequalities of political voice through organized interests. It first differentiates between, on the one hand, the view of organized interest influence that emerges from the periodic scandals involving the use of illicit cash and favors to buy policy benefits from public officials and, on the other, the ordinary, and completely legal, inequalities intrinsic to organized interest politics. The chapter also discusses the multiple factors that make it even more difficult than it is for individual input to identify in practice when a circumstance of equal political voice has been achieved for organized interest input. Finally, a large section of this chapter is devoted to considering whether organized interest activity can make a difference for political outcomes.

This chapter maps the terrain of political activity by organizations using systematic empirical data to reveal something about the political voice emerging from organized involvement in various domains of national politics. For various domains of organizational activity, the chapter characterizes categories of organizations with respect to the likelihood that organizations are active and, if active, how much they do. In the process this chapter clarifies the strategic considerations and resource constraints that shape the involvement of different kinds of organizations in different arenas. Here, it becomes apparent that the policy makers in different institutional settings hear quite different mixes of messages.

Reviews received explanations of why governments regulate risk in the way they do and identifies a triangle of contextual forces that may sometimes pull together in shaping risk regulation regimes and sometimes pull in opposite directions. Those forces relate to market failure, mass public opinion, and organized interests. The chapter argues that analysis of these contextual factors can help explain variety amongst risk regulation regimes but identifies some of the methodological problems involved in such an analysis. Detailed analysis of how far such contextual factors shape the content of risk regulation regimes is presented in Chs.5, 6, and 7.

This chapter uses systematic data collected for the Washington Representatives Study to inquire into the kinds of interests that are represented by organizations in national politics and the extent to which that configuration approximates equality of political voice. The survey presented here has made clear that, for all the variety in the interests represented by organizations in Washington, the pressure system is far from universal. Many constituencies with a seeming interest in federal policies have no organization of their own. What is more, both the free rider problem and the resource constraint problem here imply that organized interest representation in Washington is riddled with everyday inequalities.

Sets out two key dimensions for analysing risk regulation regimes that are employed throughout the book. The first dimension relates to the three constituent components of a risk regulation regime that are common to any control system—i.e. ways of gathering information, ways of setting standards, goals or targets and ways of changing behaviour and enforcement to meet the standards or targets. The second dimension relates both to the context of risk regulation regimes—i.e. the character of the risks being tackled, public attitudes towards risks and the configuration of related organized interests— and the content of regimes—i.e. their size, structure, and style. Analysis of risk regulation regimes along these two dimensions provides an essential starting point for compartive analysis, picks up fine‐grained distinctions between regimes and identifies regime features that are central to a range of debates about risk regulation.

Explores the logic of basing risk regulation on mass popular opinion and explores the extent and conditions in which state regulation of risk reflects general public opinion. The chapter draws together existing empirical evidence about public attitudes towards the nine case‐study risks and presents a substantial and original analysis of the salience of those risks in UK newspapers over 12 years to 1998. Analysis suggests that public opinion is certainly a shaper of risk regulation regimes, most obviously in relation to some standard‐setting activities, but it appears to be a constraint or support rather than the key driver. Regulatory activity appears to be better explained by the contingent alignment and relative strengths of other forces shaping regimes. Moreover, the chapter also identifies four important strategies employed by regulators for managing misalignments between public preferences and the preferences of policy experts or other organized interests.

This chapter examines the evolution of the Washington pressure community, assessing changes in the number and distribution of active organizations over a twenty-five-year span. Of special concern is whether these patterns—in particular, the strong representation of business interests in contrast to the economic interests of less economically advantaged—are unique to a 2001 analysis or are a persistent aspect of organized interest representation in Washington. The chapter reveals how most of the organizations new to the pressure community are not organizations that never existed before; rather, they are organizations that have been outside of politics and, for reasons that are less well studied, are activated into politics. Thus the shape of the pressure community is influenced by a number of factors—of which an important one, but far from the only one, is the set of processes by which new political organizations come into being.