Welcome to the Webpages of the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance

Regulation and governance have become popular phenomena for social scientists to study and for good reason. Although redistributive, distributive and developmental policies still abound, the expanding part of governance is regulation. Indeed, few projects are more central to the social sciences than the study of regulation and regulatory governance. Regulation and the significant issues raised by it have become central to the work of social scientists from many disciplines – political science, economics, law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, history and others.

Our mission is to open regulatory studies to the turn toward governance and to help create a space where all social sciences will take regulation more seriously, whether political science, regulatory economics, law and society scholarship, anthropology, history, geography, sociology, psychology, business, law, or other disciplines. We believe that these disciplines will take regulation more seriously if we can move the boundaries of regulation toward the boundaries of governance. This means, we suspect, that advances in regulatory theory will have an exciting integrative potential for the social sciences overall. Indeed, we believe that regulatory studies have emerged at the cutting edge of paradigmatic change in the social sciences.

The Biennial Conference, supported by the European Consortium on Political Research Standing Group on Regulatory Governance and organized by host universities, is the leading interdisciplinary conference on regulation. It attracts papers from all over the globe and from disciplines including political science, law, accounting, business, sociology, economics, international relations, anthropology, public administration and other cognate disciplines. The conference highlights include the Majone Prize for the best paper at the conference by an early career researcher; the Award for Regulatory Studies Development for recognizing the contributions to the field of regulatory governance by senior scholars; and keynote lectures and speeches by leading academics and policymakers.

Whilst next biennial conference was supposed to be hosted by the University of Exeter in June 2020, it has been cancelled due to Covid and rescheduled for June 23-25, 2021 and took place virtually.

Our colleagues in the Chinese University of Hong Kong hosted "Unpacking the Complexity of Regulatory Governance in a Globalizing World”, an International Conference to inaugurate a Global Regulatory Governance Research Network, from 4th to 6th July 2019.

The International Conference was jointly organized by the Department of Government and Public Administration and the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with the support of the Standing Group on the Regulatory Governance of the European Consortium of Political Research.

To join the email list which serves the members of the politics of regulation network, aiming to advance the study of regulation with an interdisciplinary orientation, subscribe to the list.