Politics & History of Market Governance

Course goals

After following this course, students have

• An understanding of the meaning of regulatory governance in globalized markets, including public and private/societal forms of regulation and governance and their relation
• An understanding of the role of professional and civil society actors in making, executing and enforcing public and private regulation, and their strengths and weaknesses
•  A historical understanding of the main developments with regard to regulating markets, with a focus on pre-modern and recent history

And are able to:

• distinguish and combine core concepts, theories and findings from political science and history on regulatory governance of markets
• communicate research in written and verbal form
• professional skills: oral presentation; academic writing skills; interdisciplinary analysis; problem solving.

Content

This course offers a political science and historical perspective on market regulation. It offers a dynamic and empirical perspective on the relations between the state, civil society and business actors, and will show that these actors often are closely intertwined or even hybrid. Main premise of the course is that public and private regulation and governance interact and can complement each other, and that markets are political institutions, crafted and emerging out of political struggle and historically grown relations.
The course discusses the following topics:

• regulatory policy and evidence on its effectiveness, and historic and recent developments in regulatory policy including politics of deregulation and re-empowerment of regulation and the rise of ‘behavioral’ approaches to regulation;
• main political approaches to regulation of markets, incl. (neo)liberalism and regulatory capitalism;
• history and evolution of ideas about fairness of market governance, such as moral economy, just price, and gender- and ethnicity based differentiation in access to markets;
• globalization and regulation: the way globalization creates regulatory gaps and loopholes, but also transnational regulation through public and market actors and informal business networks, both historically as well as in 21-century markets. In this context we will also discuss the emergence of the multinational corporation as a regulatory institution in itself;
• the role and effectiveness of self-regulation by professional associations, guilds and civil society organizations;
• the role of reputation as a regulatory mechanism, and the way it is used in naming and shaming strategies and reputational sanctions and their (in)effectiveness;
• regulatory strategies for regulation of (technological)  innovation including the regulation of politically powerful platforms in historic and recent cases.

This course has priority rules and a waiting list.

Additional information

This course is only open to students from the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Law, Economics, and Governance.

This course has priority rules and a waiting list. Your enrolment is guaranteed if you are: 

• a student in the BA PPE enrolled in the thematic package Markets and Regulators.

In all other situations, you will be placed on a waiting list if you enrol in this course. For any remaining slots in the course, lots are drawn among the students on the waiting list.