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, regulation has become an essential tool in the toolbox of policy makers across the globe and in Europe more specifically. Indeed, only a few projects are more central to the social sciences than the study of regulation and regulatory governance.

Our mission is to open regulatory studies to the turn towards governance and to help create a space in which social scientists – no matter whether they have backgrounds in political science, regulatory economics, law and society scholarship, anthropology, history, geography, sociology, psychology, business and legal studies – may explore the interaction between regulation and governance, both theoretically and empirically.

We believe that regulation will be taken more seriously if we move the boundaries of regulation towards 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 for Political Research Standing Group on Regulatory Governance and organized by host universities, is the leading interdisciplinary conference on regulation. It attracts scholars from all over the globe and from disciplines such as political science, law, accounting, business, sociology, economics, international relations, anthropology, public administration and other cognate areas of research.