Brendon Swedlow

Precautionary regulation in Europe and the United States: a quantitative comparison.

Much attention has been addressed to the question of whether Europe or the United States adopts a more precautionary stance to the regulation of potential environmental, health, and safety risks. Some commentators suggest that Europe is more risk-averse and precautionary, whereas the United States is seen as more risk-taking and optimistic about the prospects for new technology. Others suggest that the United States is more precautionary because its regulatory process is more legalistic and adversarial, while Europe is more lax and corporatist in its regulations. The flip-flop hypothesis claims that the United States was more precautionary than Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, and that Europe has become more precautionary since then. We examine the levels and trends in regulation of environmental, health, and safety risks since 1970. Unlike previous research, which has studied only a small set of prominent cases selected nonrandomly, we develop a comprehensive list of almost 3,000 risks and code the relative stringency of regulation in Europe and the United States for each of 100 risks randomly selected from that list for each year from 1970 through 2004. Our results suggest that: (a) averaging over risks, there is no significant difference in relative precaution over the period, (b) weakly consistent with the flip-flop hypothesis, there is some evidence of a modest shift toward greater relative precaution of European regulation since about 1990, although (c) there is a diversity of trends across risks, of which the most common is no change in relative precaution (including cases where Europe and the United States are equally precautionary and where Europe or the United States has been consistently more precautionary). The overall finding is of a mixed and diverse pattern of relative transatlantic precaution over the period.

Toward cultural analysis in policy analysis: Picking up where Aaron Wildavsky left off

To generate policy alternatives and offer policy advice, the policy analysis and planning literature counsels analysts to assess the values and beliefs of policy actors, as well as the organizational and political contexts in which an analysts proposed solution will have to be enacted and implemented, but does not further specify what these values, beliefs, and contexts might be. Analysts can anticipate the kinds of political values and the kinds of beliefs about human nature, the environment, and the economy that are likely to be associated with different forms of social organization by relying on Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavskys theory of culture. Additionally, this form of cultural analysis will allow analysts to deduce which policy problems are most likely to arise, which policy solutions are most likely to be feasible, and which policy advocacy coalitions are most probable in different cultural contexts.

A Cultural Theory of Politics

Many political scientists first learned of anthropologist Mary Douglass cultural theory (CT) through Aaron Wildavskys APSA presidential address (Wildavsky 1987), in which he sought to explain the value of this theoretical approach for political science. Since then, much additional work has been done to develop CT as an ambitious general theory of politics.

Theorizing and Generalizing About Risk Assessment and Regulation Through Comparative Nested Analysis of Representative Cases

This article provides a framework and offers strategies for theorizing and generalizing about risk assessment and regulation developed in the context of an on-going comparative study of regulatory behavior. Construction of a universe of nearly 3,000 risks and study of a random sample of 100 of these risks allowed us to estimate relative U.S. and European regulatory precaution over a thirty-five-year period. Comparative nested analysis of cases selected from this universe of ecological, health, safety, and other risks or its eighteen categories or ninety-two subcategories of risk sources or causes will allow theory-testing and -building and many further descriptive and causal comparative generalizations.

Cultural Coproduction of Four States of Knowledge

In States of Knowledge (2004), Sheila Jasanoff argues that we gain explanatory power by thinking of natural and social orders as being produced together, but she and her volume contributors do not yet offer a theory of the coproduction of scientific knowledge and social order. This article uses Mary Douglas’s cultural theory to identify four recurring states of knowledge and to specify political–cultural conditions for the coproduction of scientific knowledge, social order, and scientific, cultural, and policy change. The plausibility of this theory is illustrated by using it to explain the coproduction and transformation of forest and wildlife science and management in the Pacific Northwest.

Value Preferences and Ideological Structuring of Attitudes in American Public Opinion

In this study, we investigate four attitudinal structures (including liberal, conservative, and libertarian configurations) associated with two ideological dimensions among American voters and demonstrate that these attitudinal structures are related in expected ways to differential preferences for the values of freedom, order, and equality/caring. Liberals are inclined to trade freedom for equality/caring but not for order, whereas conservatives are their opposites—willing to trade freedom for order but not for equality/caring. In contrast, libertarians are generally less willing than others to trade freedom for either order or equality/caring (although they probably prefer order to equality/caring). The fourth ideological type is more willing than the others to relinquish freedom, preferring both order and equality/caring. Depending on how our results are interpreted, this fourth type may be characterized as either communitarian or humanitarian. These findings help close the gap between unidimensional conceptions and multidimensional evidence of ideological organization in political attitudes by demonstrating that value structure and attitudinal structure are strongly related in two ideological dimensions.

Using the boundaries of science to do boundary-work among scientists: pollution and purity claims

The primary purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the boundary between science and non-science gets used to do boundary-work among scientists. Claims that scientists have been polluted by breaches of this boundary, or, conversely, claims that scientists remain pure and unpolluted, are effectively ways to construct boundaries within science, between more and less authoritative scientists. A secondary purpose of this article is to identify sources of pollution and purity claims. Examples are taken from a case study of the role owl and forest scientists played in constructing nature and environmental policy in the Pacific Northwest. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Cultural Surprises as Sources of Sudden, Big Policy Change

A major complaint against cultural theories is that they cannot explain political change (Lockhart 1997). Cultural and institutional accounts of politics are also often seen as antagonistic (Chai 1997; Grendstad and Selle 1995; Lockhart 1999). The cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others (see, e.g., Schwarz and Thompson 1990; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990), by contrast, offers a theory of culture that includes a theory of cultural change that integrates institutions into its explanation of change (Lockhart 1997, 1999; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990, 69–81; Wildavsky 1985). Moreover, CT can help specify the cultural conditions for sudden, big institutional and policy change, thereby, I argue, strengthening Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Joness “punctuated equilibria” (PE) theory of change (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002). The plausibility of this CT of PE change is illustrated in this article by using it to explain dramatic changes in forest and wildlife management in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) (building on Swedlow 2002a, b, 2003, 2007, 2009, and 2011a, b).

Policy Advocacy Coalitions as Causes of Policy Change in China? Analyzing Evidence from Contemporary Environmental Politics

Abstract This article employs the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), a set of concepts developed to account for policymaking primarily in the United States, to analyze factors that led China to downsize its latest big hydropower project, on the Nu River. The ACF helps us identify two conflicting coalitions based on their policy beliefs and the resources they mobilized to translate their beliefs into policy change, which the ACF also helps us explain. Conflict between state agencies contributed to the rise of a societally based environmental coalition to oppose a state-centered development coalition, and struggle and strategic learning between these coalitions led to interventions by the premier and a scaling down of the project from 13 dams to four.

Better Ways to Study Regulatory Elephants

We are grateful to the editor and reviewers for this opportunity to respond to the five essays reviewing two recent books comparing regulation in the US and Europe: The Politics of Precaution: Regulating Health, Safety, and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States, and The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe. We agree with reviewer Maria Weimer and with David Vogel that both of these books help create a research agenda for comparative studies of regulation, including studies of relative precaution, by developing theoretical explanations and a systematic basis for collecting data to test them. We also agree with reviewer Susan Rose-Ackerman that comparative studies of regulation should examine not only relative precaution, but more broadly the interrelationships among precaution, proportionality, impact assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and other analytic frameworks – and the value choices embedded in them. We addressed those important issues in the concluding chapter of our book, but they certainly deserve additional inquiry. And we thank Fabrizio Cafaggi for his extensive review of our book in an earlier issue of this journal; there he emphasized our book’s contribution to the evolving understanding of transnational regulatory networks. Both books undertake a descriptive comparison of relative precaution in American and European regulation over the past several decades. The two books differ in their findings, and in the evidence on which those findings rest. We thank reviewers Susan RoseAckerman, Adam Burgess, and Jane K. Winn for acknowledging the strong empirical evidence of actual policymaking that is assembled in our book. We disagree, however, with the reviewers who allege that our book has somehow “missed the wood for the trees” or cast “empiricism” against “humanism”, ostensibly because Europe yearns to define its “identity” as precautionary or because European regulation “feels” more precautionary. In our view, it is a mistake to confuse rhetoric with reality, or feelings with actions, and it is an illusion to conflate political aspirations with actual policymaking. That is why we studied actual policies: to test whether they reflect the political rhetoric or not. To characterize the forest and see whether it has moved, one must examine a representative sample of the trees – which is what we have done. To compare regulatory policies, one must actually study the policies and avoid being seduced by aspirational rhetoric and symbolic politics which are not themselves evidence of real regulation. * Jonathan B. Wiener is Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University and a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF). Brendon Swedlow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, at Northern Illinois University. James K. Hammitt is Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at the Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health, and visiting professor at the Toulouse School of Economics (LERNA-INRA). Michael D. Rogers is a former member of the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, at the European Commission. Peter H. Sand is lecturer in International Environmental Law at the University of Munich.