TheWrst is exempliWed in the work of Vogel ( 1983 , 1986 , 1996 ). Vogel’s keyargument is that in the regulation of economic life there are distinctive national
institutional structures, and distinctive national patterns in the way those structures
function. In particular, the institutions of economic regulation in the most import-
ant capitalist democracy, the United States, are exceptional: in their reliance on a
network of specialized regulatory agencies; in the extent to which those agencies
operate legally enforced rules; in the detail of those rules; and in the degree to which
the practice of regulation involves highly adversarial relationships between the two
key sets of institutions—the agencies that do the regulating and theWrms in the
regulated industries (see also Kelman 1981 ). The contrast lies between the United
States and two other kinds of national model: Those that, while relying heavily on
legal institutions, are strongly consensual in operation, a common pattern across
mainland Western Europe; and those that substantially dispense with the law,
relying instead on highly consensual forms of self-regulation, a pattern exempliWed
by the United Kingdom (Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004 , part II).
Whence come these national contrasts? The answers take us immediately to
those themes in North that stress the importance of lock-in and path dependency
shaped by the constraints of history. The contrast between the USA and the UK
illustrates. In the United States, on the one hand, the development of formal
democracy, and the rise of populist movements hostile to modern corporate
capitalism, preceded the creation of regulatory institutions. In the UK, by contrast,
regulatory institutions, and regulatory styles, were laid down, notably in the
middle decades of the nineteenth century, before the development of either an
interventionist state or formally democratic institutions. (On this kind of national
peculiarity, see Atiyah 1979 ; MacDonagh 1961 , 1977 ; Moran 2003 ). Modes of regu-
latory thinking which stressed the importance of informal cooperation, naturally
strong in a pre-democratic society where politics was dominated by a coalition
of bourgeois and aristocratic elites, were thus well established before the emergence
of formally democratic institutions. Crudely: AmericaWrst got populism, then
economic regulation; BritainWrst got economic regulation, then democracy.
Tw o d iYculties with the national styles hypothesis are obvious. The less serious
is that this can never be anything but a thesis aboutmodalinstitutional patterns,
and we still have to make sense of the distribution around the mode. But a more
serious diYculty takes us directly to the competing alternative posed above,
reXexive regulation. There are many diVerent nuances in reXexive accounts, but
all share this belief: that conditions of high social and economic complexity oblige
the development of common institutional patterns and practices. The measures of
complexity include the technological complexity of many modern industrial
processes; the institutional complexity of modernWrms and industries; and the
intellectual complexity of modern regulatory operations. Complexity undermines
institutions that rely for compliance on command, including command law. The
search for eVectiveness forces a secular shift to more ‘‘reXexive’’ forms. Practically,
148 michael moran