The New Politics of Interdependence: Cross-National Layering in Trans-Atlantic Regulatory Disputes – with Abraham Newman

How are regulatory disputes between the major powers resolved? Existing literature generally characterizes such regulatory disagreements as system clash, in which national systems of regulation come into conflict, so that one sets the global standard, and the other adjusts or is marginalized. In this article, we offer an alternative account, which bridges early literature on interdependence with work from Historical Institutionalism in comparative politics. We argue that rule overlap creates opportunities for regulatory actors to develop transnational alliances in support of an alternative institutional agenda. Over time, the resulting “cross-national layers” have the potential to transform domestic institutions and in turn global rules. International regulatory disputes are less discrete international conflicts between sovereign jurisdictions than ongoing battles among regulatory actors within jurisdictions (and alliances across them). We examine two critical issue areas—surveillance information sharing and accounting standards—which allow us to contrast our argument against standard accounts emphasizing veto points and switching costs, respectively.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2015), “The New Politics of Interdependence: Cross-National Layering in Trans-Atlantic Regulatory Disputes,” Comparative Political Studies, 48,4:497-526.

Other Writing:

Academic Article

Ontology, Methodology and Causation in the American School of International Political Economy – with Martha Finnemore

This paper explores disjunctures between ontology and methodology in the American school to better understand both the limits of this approach and ways we can counter its blind spots. Tierney and Maliniak’s TRIP data point to a strong elective affinity between, on the one hand, rationalist/liberal 10 ontological assumptions and quantitative methodologies, and on the other, constructivist ...
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Essay

Forget Me Not: What the EU’s New Internet Privacy Ruling Means for the United States – with Abraham Newman

The modern innovators of Internet human rights are not U.S. leaders or bold Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They are stodgy bureaucrats, politicians, and lawyers in Brussels, Berlin, and Strasbourg. As the National Security Agency (NSA) and American firms have relied on sucking up massive amounts of data to observe citizens and create and serve consumers, the ...
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