The Rise of the Competition State:
The dynamics of British and American Telecom and Electricity Regimes By: David Levi-Faur Forthcoming: Current Politics and Economics of Europe. Abstract Change, global or local, is an omnipresent phenomenon nowadays: it leaves its mark everywhere and thus requires us to study it both empirically and theoretically. One of the most challenging lines of inquiry in the study of change is Majone's notion of the transformation of the positive (interventionist) state into a regulatory state (Majone, 1997). The aim of this paper is to examine from a critical point of view the transformation from a positive to a regulatory state and to refine the distinctions that are offered by Majone. To do so, the paper compares the governance of the telecom and electricity in the US and the UK from the very beginnings of the commercialization of these two networks in the 1880s. The paper points to the positive and interventionist characters of the current regimes, to the rise of "ordered competition", and to the creation of new structures that reflect a transformation to a Competition State rather than to a Regulatory State. The paper analyzes the different trajectories of the American and British telecom and electricity regimes up to the 1980s and their convergence on "ordered competition" since then. It argues that while the British trajectory may be described as movement from the Service-provision State to the Competition State, the American trajectory may be described as a movement from the Regulatory State to the Competition State. The trend towards regimes of ordered competition, however, leaves plenty of room for divergencies in regime design, in the policy community, and in policy outcomes. |