PART V: LEARNING TO DEAL WITH DEMANDS FOR PARTICIPATION
VI. CONCLUSION: FAVORABLE DOMESTIC ACTOR CONSTELLATIONS AS A PRECONDITION FOR POLICY
and Dutch administrative and political elites. In The Netherlands, the government created several expert committees, which provided knowledge on international policy developments and thus came to act as norm entre- preneurs. The Swiss OFCOM mandated expert reports and was active in international telecommunication organizations such as the ITU and the IRG, where it tookpart in the collective learning process. Even though the organizational structure of the policy sector was largely similar in all three countries after 1993—all of them had created specialized bodies as parts of the administration or independent experts committees—it was only in The Netherlands and in Switzerland that these bodies really came to play the role of norm entrepreneurs. In Austria, where domestic economic claims for reform remained largely absent until 1997, the administrative actor in the field of telecommunications adopted a rather passive position toward liber- alization and never autonomously mobilized external expertise on the issue.
In contrast to the Dutch and Swiss cases, there was no learning process among the Austrian administration. In this case, external pressure by the EU Commission was much more decisive in accelerating the reform process, and this finally led to a form of mimetism and emulation through copying of the German legislation.
Cross-country differences in terms of economic structure, and the resulting various national configurations of actors and interests, largely explain the particular mechanisms of adaptation observed in the three countries. They cannot account, however, for all aspects of a country’s trajectory. Additional elements such as partisan variables or even the specific behavior of those involved also played a certain role. In The Netherlands, for instance, the right-wing liberal coalition in government in the 1980s favored the rapid adoption of the first steps toward liberalization. Conversely, the fact that the Austrian Ministry of Transport was directed by a minister of the SPO¨, a party with very close links to trade unions and the national operator, also contributed to the Ministry’s passive and reluctant attitude in the process of liberalization.
VI. CONCLUSION: FAVORABLE DOMESTIC ACTOR
broader economic and social structures of a specific country, which affect domestic actor constellations and therefore the learning capacity of national elites. Thus, it appears clearly that policy transfer and learning should not be considered as‘‘automatic’’and technocratic processes of knowledge transfer, serving a consensual goal of better policy efficiency, but rather as the result of specific interest configurations, power relations, and learning processes at a given time in a given country.
Finally, we would like to stress some similarities and differences concerning the mechanisms of policy transfer in the three countries under scrutiny. On the one hand, the existence of similar institutional characteristics of consensual democracies (corporatist institutions and multiparty govern- mental coalitions) contributed in all three countries to slowing down to some extent the pace of reforms by inhibiting radical reform strategies, such as the one adopted in the UK. Traditional features of‘‘negotiation democracies’’
favored generally rather consensual reform processes. On the other hand, the distinction between the social (Austria) and the liberal version (The Nether- lands and Switzerland) of democratic corporatism, related to the degree of outward orientation of these three economies, explains, to a large extent, the presence or absence of domestic impulses for telecom reform and of learning processes among political, administrative, and economic elites. In The Netherlands and Switzerland, adaptation to EU regulation and global pressure can mainly be explained by domestic initiatives emanating from economic actors interested in telecom liberalization, and by the emergence of new norm entrepreneurs in the national administration. In these two liberal countries, domestic elites were much more receptive on the issue of telecom- munication liberalization, which was put on the political agenda very early and quite independently of the European evolution. In both countries, the national operator developed an international business strategy in order to expand its activities abroad. Similarly, national administrations were in- volved in different formal and informal international bodies active on telecom issues. In brief, domestic actors’ configuration and external trends were largely congruent. Therefore, the coercive impact of the EU was weak. By contrast, the absence of domestic policy entrepreneurs until the mid-1990s in Austria also explains the absence of an ongoing learning process among the administrative and political elites, as well as the more coercive pressure exerted by the EU Commission.
The central importance of domestic structures for policy transfer also tends to nuance the role of the EU as a trigger of national telecom policy reforms, as was also underlined by Schneider (2001) and Levi-Faur (2004).
This statement is particularly true for The Netherlands and Switzerland, where the initial impulses for telecom reform were already on the political agenda during the first half of the 1980s. The role of the EU must therefore be
qualified. In general, it acted as an intervening force in a global context of technological changes and economic liberalization. In countries where do- mestic actors actively mobilized for telecommunications liberalization, the EU only played a secondary role. Nevertheless, the extensive EU legislation as well as the EU agenda were decisive for the timing and the content of telecom policy reforms in The Netherlands and Switzerland. By contrast, the less extraverted nature of the Austrian economy as well as the tight relations between political authorities and the national telecom operator prevented the early start of a learning process. It was only later during the 1990s, first with the EEA Treaty and then with EU membership, that telecom liberalization became a major issue in this country. Because of the lackof domestic support for liberalization, external coercion was much more important, and the EU Commission, partly in alliance with some domestic actors, came to play the decisive role in the reform process. The relative passivity of domestic actors also explains why in the final steps of the reform imitation, rather than genuine learning, were more important in Austria. Hence, in EU member countries, it seems that‘‘vertical Europeanization’’can compensate for the lackof‘‘horizontal Europeanization.’’In that sense, whether EU member- ship ‘‘matters’’(i.e., whether it has an impact that is independent of more general pressures for reform stemming from globalization) mostly depends on domestic factors. Future research on this topic should continue to focus on variables at the national level, which determine the responsiveness of national economies and political systems to regional and global pressures for change.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This chapter is part of the research project ‘‘Reshaping decision-making processes under external pressure,’’directed by Prof. Y. Papadopoulos and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 5004-058511/1) as a part of its Priority Programme‘‘Switzerland Towards the Future.’’We would like to thank Fabrizio Gilardi, Alex Fischer, and the two volume editors for helpful comments on previous versions of this chapter. The usual disclaimer applies, however.
LIST OF INTERVIEW PARTNERS
The Netherlands
I Djikman, Hans Willem, Directorate General for Telecommunica- tions and Post (HDTP), policy unit, The Hague
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7
Toward a Latin American Regulatory State?
The Diffusion of Autonomous Regulatory Agencies across Countries and Sectors
Jacint Jordana
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain David Levi-Faur
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
I. INTRODUCTION
This chapter explores the sweeping restructuring of the state in Latin America, a region of the world that, since the 1990s, has been highly receptive to regulatory reforms, in general, and to the creation of autonomous regulatory authorities, in particular. We present a unique dataset on the establishment and reform of regulatory agencies in 19 countries and 12 sectors since the early 1920s. Our dataset reveals an explosive growth of regulatory agencies across different sectors and nations in Latin America. From 43 agencies in 1979 (mostly in the financial sector), the overall number grew threefold to 134 by the end of 2002. In addition, although in 1979 only 21 of those agencies were nominally autonomous, the total number of nominally autonomous agencies grew almost sixfold to 119 by the end of 2002 (see Fig. 1). Although this number represents only about 60% of total potential adoptions in these countries and sectors, and in only 53% of the potential cases is there a nominal commitment to autonomy, it still represents a sweeping success for the idea of governance through regulatory authorities.
A particular institutional design of regulatory governance through autono- 155
mous agencies that was long confined to the United States (at the country level) and central banking (at the sectoral level) is evolving from ‘‘best practice’’ to a hegemonic institution grounded in a new convention in economic governance (Levi-Faur, 2002). In fact, not one sector studied here and not one country in the region, including Cuba, has remained untouched by the process. Yet countries and sectors differ in their reception of the institutional reforms, and we aim to demonstrate that these differences shed some light on globalization as a diffusion process.
We draw a major distinction between sectoral and national patterns of diffusion. This distinction is itself grounded in a distinction between the national patterns approach (NPA) and the policy sector approach (PSA) to comparative analysis (Levi-Faur, 2004b). This distinction challenges deeply entrenched research designs that treat the nation as the exclusive unit of analysis in the study of politics, in general, and of diffusion, in particular.1 These studies that focus on decisions relating to a single sector (or issue) are often oblivious to the presence of significant sectoral variations. This paper emphasizes sectoral variations in the creation of regulatory agencies and therefore facilitates a more refined account of the process of regulatory reform without ignoring the importance of national variations. Indeed, we assert the advantages of cross-sectoral analysis on the basis of a former study of the data. After controlling for a battery of variables, we found that within-sector diffusion (i.e., from one country to another, but at the same sector) is as strong as, or stronger than, diffusion across sectors within the same country. This provides empirical support for the use of compound research designs, in general, and the combination of analysis of sectoral and national variations and similarities in the same research design, in particular (Jordana and Levi- Faur, 2003).
We ask a single, major question: What can we learn about state restructuring in Latin America by examining temporal, sectoral, and national Figure 1 The growth of regulatory agencies in Latin America, 1920–2002.
variations in this process of institutional change? This is a modest question that leaves many avenues open for future study, yet we believe that it is challenging enough to merit attention. We use some descriptive statistics to capture the process, and discuss three major comparative perspectives to answer the question. We first examine the process from a comparative historical perspective (the temporal patterns approach), looking at the period from the 1920s to 1978. The comparative historical perspective allows us to distinguish between a sector-centered process of diffusion up to 1979 and a mixed process of diffusion across both nations and sectors since 1979.2 Second, we examine diffusion as a national process, and reveal a high degree of variation among different countries in adopting regulatory institutions.
This confirms the finding of the NPA that national-level characteristics exert a major impact on policy, politics, economics, and society. Accordingly, it suggests also that nations will vary considerably in the way regulatory authorities are adapted and that sectoral variations of regulatory agencies within each country will be minimal.
A third section examines the growth of regulatory agencies as a cross- sectoral diffusion process in Latin America and demonstrates high levels of variation in the diffusion of regulatory agencies across sectors. This confirms the finding of the PSA that sector-level variables will be the major determi- nant of reforms, and advocates comparisons of sectors (e.g., Atkinson and Coleman, 1989; Hollingsworth et al., 1994). Accordingly, this approach proposes:‘‘[First] that the style of policy making and the nature of political conflicts in a country will vary significantly from sector to sector. . . .[And second] that policy making in a particular sector will exhibit strong similarities, whatever its national context’’ (Freeman, 1986, p. 486). The concluding part examines the implications of our observations for under- standing state transformations in Latin America and, in particular, the implications of the rise of the regulatory state in the region. We start, however, with a discussion of the process of diffusion, the political and economic background of the diffusion of regulatory authorities in Latin America since the 1980s, and the notions of the rise of the regulatory state and, at the global level, of the institutionalization of a new order of
‘‘regulatory capitalism.’’