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Advances the thesis that neither single case study nor macroscopic Risk Society perspectives on risk and its management can account for variety amongst risk regulation regimes. Instead, a meso‐level institutional approach is needed that can capture and illuminate the complex institutional geographies, rules, practices, and animating ideas that are associated with the regulation of particular risks. This chapter argues that a systems‐based concept of a risk regulation regime can help capture such variety in three important ways. First, a regime perspective provides a systematic method for dimensionalizing and comparing risk regulation within different policy domains and identifying puzzles and questions that are not easily visible from other approaches. Second, a regime perspective provides a solid framework for systematically testing and developing theories about the forces that shape the constituent components of risk regulation regimes. Third, a regime perspective brings out the relationships between the different parts of a regulatory system, which can help identify reasons for regulatory failure and why reforms to one part of the system may have little impact on the regulatory system as a whole.

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.

Uses the analytic framework developed in Ch. 2 to compare nine different risk regulation regimes, bringing out their similarities and differences. Those risks include attacks by dangerous dogs outside the home, exposure to radon at home and work, benzene in the air and in the workplace, paedophile offenders released from custody, local road safety, and exposure to pesticide residues in food and water. Analysis of those regimes provides empirical evidence that there are substantial differences between the regulation of different risks and even the same risks within different contexts. Those variations are not easily explained by historical ‘big picture’ theories, such as the risk society thesis. Instead, investigation of the revealed variations between regimes suggests a need for more systematic and nuanced explanations.

Rehearses what the regime perspective can do for enhancing our understanding of how risk regulation varies, works, and fails. Drawing on the preceeding analysis, the chapter identifies three key problems central to contemporary risk regulation. First, the chapter argues that many of the regimes studied in the book were afflicted by limited institutional coherence, with basic constituent components either missing, malfunctioning or poorly linked. Second, the chapter argues that contemporary trends to reform risk regulation regimes need to take greater account of blame‐avoidance imperatives in the institutional shaping of reform processes. Third, the chapter identifies some of the challenges and intractabilities of actually doing risk regulation, which are often overlooked by commonly cited but rarely followed principles of better regulation. The book concludes with an overall assessment of what future developments in regime analysis might promise for our further understanding of 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 describes how and explains why American regulatory policies have moved away from and European policies moved toward a precautionary approach to assessing and managing risks. It begins by documenting the precautionary basis of many of the risk regulations adopted by the United States, primarily before 1990, providing further evidence that there is nothing distinctively “European” about a precautionary approach to risk regulation. It then turns to the increasingly important role of regulatory impact analyses in the United States, which include both scientific risk assessments and cost–benefit analyses. The United States also experienced an influential backlash that questioned the rationale behind many of the highly risk-averse regulations it had previously adopted, claiming that many were false positive policy errors.

Various forms of irrationality often provide the rationale for intervention to address market failures. However, in a democratic society, these forms of irrationality often provide the impetus for government policy. The policy task is to develop risk regulation policies that would emerge if the public responded rationally to risk.

Moves away from explaining the comparative statics of risk regulation regimes and explores what happens when regimes are under pressure to change, and, in particular, when they are under presure for greater openness and transparency. The chapter develops a style‐phase model of staged organizational responses to external pressure for change and compares its predictive value against two competing hypotheses. Examination of the nine case‐study risk regulation regimes reveals that, contrary to the common belief that such pressures are all pervasive, less than half were exposed to substantial pressures of this type. Responses of organizations in the ‘high‐pressure’ regimes were varied, but the overall pattern was consistent with a mixture of an autopoietic and staged‐response hypothesis stressing blame prevention. The chapter presents a hybrid ‘Catherine‐wheel’ model of the observed pattern and concludes by discussing the implications for policy outcomes.

This chapter offers a general discussion on risk and methods of its regulation. After a brief review of different definitions of risk, including technical and psychological perspectives, it briefly addresses historical changes in its conceptualization. The second part of the chapter concentrates on the issue of risk regulation. Again, a short historical account is combined with a more extensive discussion on contemporary regulatory methods for dealing with risk. The chapter identifies a model of risk analysis, which is composed of risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication, as a dominant regulatory approach. In this context, it also discusses the issue of uncertainty in a probabilistic risk assessment and strategies that are conventionally used to address it.

This chapter introduces the linkage between economic behaviour and risk regulation policies. Analysis of individual behaviour often reveals the nature of private market failures and provides guidance with respect to the appropriate forms of intervention. However, irrationality in behaviour can also generate the impetus for misguided government policies to the extent that policies are responsive to citizen preferences even when they are irrational.

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.

Explores how much each of the three drivers discussed in the previous three chapters contributes to explaining variation in risk regulation regimes. The chapter explores the extent to which the three drivers pull together or in opposite directions in shaping regimes and explores the amount of regime variation that cannot be explained by any of them singly or in combination. Special attention is paid to those aspects of regime content that cannot be explained by the three contextual elements and the chapter identifies the importance of considering the ‘inner‐lives’ of regimes in aiding our understanding of regime variety. Overall, the chapter concludes that the orthodox accounts provided in the preceeding chapters, when taken together, can go a long way to explain the form and content of risk regulation regimes without recourse to grand theories of ‘high modernity’.

This chapter discusses how within political systems, there are important linkages among many health, safety, and environmental risk regulations. Their public issue life cycles overlap and they often follow parallel or convergent political trajectories. Each regulatory decision or non-decision has distinctive and multiple causes, and no single theory can adequately account for all the policy outcomes that have taken place in both Europe and the United States since 1960. The chapter then establishes an explanatory framework that focuses on the role and interaction of three factors: the extent and intensity of public pressures for more stringent or protective regulations, the policy preferences of influential government officials, and the criteria by which policy makers assess and manage risks.

This chapter explores several alternative explanations for the divergence in transatlantic risk regulation, and discusses the policy shifts that have taken place on both sides of the Atlantic since around 1990. The United States and the fifteen member states of the EU are affluent democracies with sophisticated public bureaucracies, substantial scientific capacities, and strong civic cultures. Their regulatory officials have access to much of the same scientific expertise and there is extensive communication among policy makers, scientists, business managers, nongovernment organizations, and citizens. The chapter shows how divergent risk regulations between the United States and the EU add to the costs of transatlantic commerce and also raise the costs of international trade as some countries adopt European standards and others adopt American ones.

This chapter draws together the main conclusions arising from the empirical study and considers the theoretical and policy implications arising from these. Topics discussed include regulating risks on British Railways (BR), modelling corporate responsiveness to regulation, lessons learned from BR, social control and risk regulation in organizations, and corporate risk management.

This chapter explores changes in public opinion regarding the transatlantic politics of risk regulation, as well as the preferences of influential policy makers. Both separately and by their interaction with one another, they have had a critical impact on shaping the divergence in transatlantic regulatory stringency. The chapter presents a broad historical overview of changes in public demands for more stringent risk regulations and the willingness of policy makers to address them. During the second half of the 1980s, the extent and intensity of public concerns about a wide range of health, safety, and environmental risks increased substantially on both sides of the Atlantic. These concerns played a role in a major expansion of consumer and environmental regulation in both the EU and the United States.

This chapter analyzes European and American policies toward a range of consumer safety risks; including drugs, children's products, and cosmetics. It shows how European and American risk regulations have converged, though the dynamics through which this occurred differed substantially. Pharmaceutical regulation constitutes the most important exception to the broader pattern of increased transatlantic regulatory policy divergence. What makes this area of regulatory policy distinctive is that its political salience increased in the United States but not in Europe. Pharmaceutical regulation also represents an important exception to the dominant pattern of transatlantic regulatory policy diffusion. In this case, European regulatory policies did affect those of the United States, first by highlighting the transatlantic drug lag, and more recently by American decisions to adopt some European practices to expedite drug approvals.