The literature on regulation has typically emphasized the ability of concentrated interest groups to secure the rules they prefer. One view argues that concentrated interests are consistently able to impose diffuse costs across large and unorganized interests. A second, largely compatible, view emphasizes the ability of powerful interest groups to mobilize expertise and to provide informational goods to politicians who adjust their legislative proposals accordingly. This paper shows that the Dodd‐ Frank legislation for financial reregulation in 2010 departs from both versions of this now conventional wisdom. Instead, this paper shows that both political parties adopted what we call a two‐tier political strategy of (1) maintaining good relations with the established financial elite and (2) simultaneously responding to the demands of grass‐roots advocacy groups for more stringent regulation. As a result, Dodd‐Frank Act falls far short of a thorough‐going redesign of the regulatory landscape, but also amounted to considerably more than business as usual. While the Dodd‐Frank Act creates new regulatory instruments and powers that hold the potential for far‐reaching changes, most of the existing agencies and market participants remain intact. This pattern of two‐tier politics is evident through the four primary policy domains treated in the legislation: macroprudential regulation, consumer protection, reestablishment of the partition between deposit banking versus proprietary trading (the Volcker Rule), and the regulation of derivatives trading.

[first revision] The financial crisis of 2008 raised the politics of regulation to a new level of practical as well as scholarly attention. This paper argues that the post - enactment politics of implementation matter as much to the success of regulatory reform as the politics of passing legislation. In contrast to the prevailing concepts of regulatory capture and business power, we find that recent reform s in U.S. financial markets hinge on intellectual resources and new organizational actors that are missing from existing theories of regulatory change. In particular, small advocacy groups have proven significantly more successful in opposing the financial - services industry than the existing literature predicts. By maintaining the salience of reform goals, elaboratiung new analytic frameworks, and deploying specialized expertise in post - enactment debates, these small organizations have contributed to a diffuse but often decisive network of pro - reform actors. Using empirical material from the rule - writing process for macroprudential supervision and for derivatives trading, we show that these small organizations coalesce with other groups to form a new stability alliance that has prevented industry groups from dominating financial regulation to the degree that occurred in earlier cases of regulatory reform.

The first coalition government in Germany between Social Democrats and Greens aimed primarily at reform legislation in a series of policies. This paper examines three policy areas of direct concern to business – job creation, codetermination, and tax policy. It argues that the coalition suffered an initial defeat in job creation and then settled into a de facto strategy of incremental reform through experimentation in the areas of codetermination and tax policy. This strategy resulted from tensions rather than agreement between the coalition partners. While the Social Democrats pressured organized business and organized labor toward compromise, the Greens wanted to undermine the encompassing control of these organized groups by bringing a broader set of constituencies into the policy process.

This dissertation examines how public private social programs expand to incorporate new groups of citizens over time. I argue that several core features of public private provision, including its requirements for market information and technical expertise, the investment and risks that private providers are often asked to take on, and the state's role in shaping and then backing boundaries to access, give rise to political conflicts between providers, excluded citizens, bureaucrats, and policymakers around issues of access. Examining the development of government homeownership policies and related financial regulations over the twentieth century, I show that groups at the boundaries of inclusion in and exclusion from public private programs - including veterans, African Americans, and women - recognized their exclusion as being generated, in part, by the state and mobilized to redraw the boundaries that had prevented them from accessing homeownership on equal terms as other citizens. In each of these cases, advocacy groups pressed for greater inclusion by appealing to private providers' profit motives, by threatening businesses' position as providers of government-backed benefits, and by contesting the legitimacy of state agencies that sanctioned their members' exclusion. A comparison with the expansion of access to homeownership down the income scale highlights the different political dynamics underlying the expansion of access to groups who are farther from the margins and have a weaker organizational support base from which to draw. Contrary to accounts of the public private welfare state that stress public inattention and business dominance, I show that the public private welfare state can and does generate intense political conflicts between providers, outsiders, and bureaucrats over its terms of access.