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.

2023 Biennial Conference

The 2023 Biennial Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance, held between 12 and 14 July 2023 in Antwerp, Belgium, is swiftly approaching. The conference provides an interdisciplinary platform for the discussion and presentation of research on regulation and regulatory governance in Europe. The theme of this year’s conference is “Regulatory Governance in Times of Turbulence, Disruptive Technologies and Crises of Trust”.

Here’s what you can expect:

Many exciting discussions and debates await with over 200 papers, spread over more than 50 panels, many of which related to the central conference themes. Take a sneak peek at the panels and papers here.

Two fascinating keynotes, one by Tony Bertelli, Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University (United States) and Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (Spain). Tony will discuss how regulations and institutions enable public administration to administer democracy through value reinforcement in light of his ongoing ERC REPGOV project. The other keynote is by Juan A. Mayoral, Ramon y Cajal Researcher at the Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain) and Associate Professor on leave at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He will talk about judicial trust and its relevance for the legal integration of the EU (ERC project).

Interesting roundtables on topics such as the future of regulatory scholarship in the light of climate change, the use of computational methods in public policy design, and a tribute to the scholarship of Lauren B. Edelman.

Learn about the exciting results from the EU H2020 TiGRE (Trust in Governance and Regulation in Europe) project, as the project’s concluding conference coincides with the 2023 Biennial Conference.

Important dates:

  • 29 May 2023: Deadline for registration (by midnight UK time)
  • 26 June 2023: Deadline for full paper upload
  • 26 June 2023: Deadline for submission of papers to be considered for the Giandomenico Majone Prize
  • 12-14 July 2023: Biennial Conference of the Standing Group on Regulatory Governance in Antwerp

Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with old and new friends in the field and to learn about the cutting edge of regulatory governance research.