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The contributors to this volume analyse how regulatory regimes that were once peculiar to the US and a few industries have, in recent years, come to define the best practice of governance over the world capitalist economy and over numerous social and economic sectors. They go on to suggest various explanations for the expansion of regulatory institutions, addressing some of the most critical problems and offering new methodological techniques to enable further study

This article provides an historical and theoretical account of the emerging regulatory welfare state, which is greatly understudied in contemporary regulatory and welfare research. We analyze the interplay between the welfare state and the regulatory state in an age in which regulation is expanding through liberalization, privatization, and the new public management of social services. We then provide a multi faceted framework for understanding the regulatory welfare state and discuss its implications in terms of 1) the normative social goals of the state; 2) the ways in which social policy is delivered through institutions; and 3) the implications of the framework for individuals' rights and duties.

The preface presents the main themes of this special issue. It starts by presenting the argument that the welfare state and the regulatory state are not dichotomies, arguing that both regulation and fiscal transfers for social purposes are increasing, particularly after the financial crisis of 2007, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 crisis. Then it moves to introduce the articles that compose this special issue, their arguments, and their theoretical and empirical contributions.

Much has been written since the early 1980s about the costs of regulation and the various ways to curb them, but thus far no one has examined empirically the rise or decline of other forms of legislation, mainly primary legislation, in the context of the "war on regulation." This article examines the extent to which the decline in the rate of production of secondary legislation in Israel since 1985 has been driven by changes in the rate of production of primary legislation. Using an original longitudinal data set, we count, codify various dimensions, and compare the type and length of primary and secondary legislations and the number of delegated provisions that primary legislations contain. We find that the relationship between primary and secondary legislation is not hierarchic, as one might have expected, but has become partially substitutive. The decline in the rate of production of secondary legislation in Israel is, perhaps paradoxically, associated with the rise of primary legislation. This opens a new research agenda on the relationships between primary and secondary legislation that goes well beyond the Israeli case.

This article analyzes the sweeping restructuring of the state in Latin America and the consequent institutionalization of a new regulatory order. The analysis is grounded in an original database that covers the creation of regulatory agencies and their reform in nineteen countries and twelve sectors over the period from 1979 to 2002. The authors' data capture both the national and the sectoral patterns of the rise of the new order, and the authors distinguish between (1) national patterns of diffusion, whereby the number of prior regulatory authorities within a country determines the probability of the establishment of new authorities in that country; and (2) sectoral patterns of diffusion, whereby the number of prior regulatory authority in the same sector in other countries determines the probability of the establishment of new regulatory authority in that sector. The results coincide with a growing body of literature that emphasizes the role of contagious diffusion and shed some new light on sectoral and national channels of diffusion.