Churches as firms: An exploration of regulatory similarities

Abstract

Regulatory states manage religious activity within their jurisdiction in the same way they manage economic activity, in an alignment pattern that reflects institutionally embedded processes. Relying on regulatory institutional options to trace consistencies in the way a regime manages economic and religious activity, the article develops and tests theoretical accounts of the presence and content  in terms of comparative variation  of this alignment. The empirical setting, primarily OECD countries in recent decades, allows us to reverse a conventional causal view and treat religious regulation as causally embedded in the logic and practice of economic regulation. If reliance on regulation as a means of social control is bound by the same processes across domains, this may even suggest the existence of national cross-sectoral models of coordinating competition. The study elaborates a broad conceptualisation of regulatory governance with potentially wide applicability.

Explaining regulatory autonomy in EU network sectors: Varieties of utility regulation?

“…The variable captures the organization density of employers as a proportion of employees in employment and, thus, a crucial dimension of countries' coordination capacity. This is a commonly used operationalization in the literature that assesses possible effects of legal systems (e.g., Patrikios & De Francesco, 2018). We calculated 10-year averages for the 2003-2013 period, preceding the measurement of the dependent variable.…”

“…The classification of countries is based on La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny (1999). This is a commonly used operationalization in the literature that assesses possible effects of legal systems (e.g., Patrikios & De Francesco, 2018). The dependent variable, regulatory autonomy, and two of the independent variables, barriers to trade and investment and the degree of employer density, have been normalized to range between 0 and 1 to facilitate the interpretation of the regression coefficients.…”

Autonomous agencies and relational contracts in government bond issues

“…While economists have studied independent central banks (de Haan & Eijffinger ), scholars of public policy have mainly focused on autonomous agencies that regulate market activity. These have proliferated in policy domains such as utilities (Haber ), competition, banking (Kleibl ; Hirsch & Shotts ; Rex ), anti‐corruption policy (Di Mascio et al ), food safety, consumer protection, the environment, and even electoral commissions (Ahuja & Ostermann ) and religion (Patrikios & De Francesco ). This trend constitutes a comprehensive transformation in the structure of the state, labeled as the rise of the regulatory state (Levi‐Faur ; Levi‐Faur & Jordana ).…”