A Backsliding Regulatory State? Explaining the Marginalization of Regulatory Oversight

The question of who controls the regulatory state is usually discussed with regards to principals via politicians. Yet, the administrative state is governed largely and significantly by regulatory controls from the bureaucratic core over the margins. In this context, there is variation concerning the effectiveness and coherence of existing regulatory oversight systems. Hence, the institutionalization of regulatory oversight agencies and procedures has attracted scholarly attention since the early 1980s. However, fewer studies have paid attention to the recent tendency for some countries to marginalize these practices. With this context in mind, we conceptualize and assess the logic that guides de facto regulatory backsliding across OECD countries by comparing the cases of UK and Mexico, two countries that developed sophisticated, albeit very different, systems of regulatory oversight in recent decades. To do this, we use process tracing by analyzing a series of semi-structured interviews and a document analysis of press articles. We argue that, rather than as a tool for governments to keep control of regulatory policy, politicians occasionally see regulatory oversight as an obstacle to the implementation of their political agendas. However, a formal dismantling of regulatory policy is hard to achieve in the short term, due to its ingraining in different legal systems. Instead, governments will seek de facto dismantling through different means. These findings have broader implications for scholars and practitioners interested in regulatory policy.