After ‘the Regulatory Moment’ in Comparative Regulatory Studies: Modeling the Early Stages of Regulatory Life Cycles

Regulation has been the subject of a significant amount of scholarship, mostly debating the necessity of regulatory action or examining the phenomenon of capture. Less attention has been paid to the early stages of regulatory development, during which the structure of the regime is defined. By revisiting the life-cycle analogy of regulation first proposed by Bernstein in 1955, we offer a new model that explains the development of these early stages in greater depth. This model is then applied to case studies of several sectors in the US and UK to highlight the general pattern of early regulatory regime development.