Transnational regulatory capture? An empirical examination of the transnational lobbying of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision

The interest ecology of financial regulation: interest group plurality in the design of financial regulatory policies

“…This finding thus supports the notion within the literature that technical complexity is a complementary aspect of financial industry power (McPhilemy, 2013;Lall, 2015;McCarty, 2013). In demonstrating the variability of mobilized dissent our findings complement recent interventions on the theme of regulatory capture and financial hegemony which suggest that finance has been subject to greater challenge since the global financial crisis (Kastner, 2014;Clapp & Helleiner, 2012;Pagliari & Young, 2014;Young, 2012;Helleiner & Thistlethwaite, 2013). Our empirical evidence suggests that we should expect to find financial regulatory policymaking processes to be less dominated by the regulated financial industry when regulation is generated after the global financial crisis, is relatively non-complex and is situated away from transnational policymaking fora.…”

“…Yet there is a wide precedent for using policy consultation data such as ours to trace the mobilization of interest groups in both qualitative studies of financial regulatory politics (Wood, 2005;Young, 2012) We selected a wide diversity of consultations on financial regulatory policy taking place between 1999 to 2013, organized by the most important regulatory authorities in the United States, Europe and at the transnational level. The range of government agencies and specialized financial regulatory bodies from which our data are derived are outlined in the Appendix.…”

“…Within the broad literature on the political economy of financial regulation, a large body of work has investigated the variety of structural, discursive and instrumental variants of power that different groups deploy in an attempt to influence the design of financial regulatory policies, as well as the numerous formal and informal channels of access through which these groups are capable to participate to policymaking process (Johnson & Kwak, 2010;Young, 2012;Sennholz-Weinhardt, 2014;Woll, 2013;Baker, 2010;Tsingou, 2014). Mechanisms to incorporate the voices of different groups in the design of regulatory policies have been institutionalized, such as the practice of seeking comments on exposure drafts of policies and inviting groups to testify in legislative hearings as a way of soliciting feedback on regulatory policies.…”

“…Many have lamented in this context how the involvement of civil society organizations has been sporadic and weak when it comes to financial regulation (Scholte, 2013;Helleiner & Porter, 2010;Mügge, 2010, p. 9;Mooslechner, Schuberth, & Weber, 2006), and the lack of countervailing forces has reinforced the "unchecked might of global finance" (Anheier, 2014). Such depictions of the financial regulatory policymaking environment has not remained uncontested, as a variety of case studies have highlighted how financial industry groups have been facing opposition from outside as well as within the financial industry since the crisis (Kastner, 2014;Clapp & Helleiner, 2012;Pagliari & Young, 2014;Young, 2012;Helleiner & Thistlethwaite, 2013). These and other observations have called into question what McKeen-Edwards and Porter (2013) call the "unified dominance model" of financial regulatory politics.…”

“…These conditions are however not fixed: the interest group environment in financial regulatory policymaking may be dynamic and changing. For instance, different empirical studies have documented how the regulated financial industry has occasionally been constrained by the opposition faced different groups -for example by NGOs and other non-business groups (Clapp & Helleiner, 2012;Kastner, 2014), as well as other business groups inside and outside the financial industry (Mügge, 2006;Young, 2012;Pagliari & Young, 2014).…”