Negotiated Reform

Book excerpt: Extensive literature already exists on the causes and development of the recent financial crisis and the political measures taken to manage it. This book brings together a group of renowned social scientists to focus on the interplay between international, European and national decision-making processes in the reform of financial market regulation. Are those states affected by the crisis adopting internationally negotiated regulations? Or are they instead determining the European and international reform agenda? Are the policies being agreed contributing to greater harmonization of financial regulation in a multilevel political system? Or is the process being dominated by differing national interests? The dominant concern of this book is the way in which the given multilevel structure of financial market regulation has shaped the reform process triggered by the recent financial crisis. Following an agreed set of questions, an international group of scholars deal in separate chapters with the role in the reform process played by international organizations, European authorities, and regulators in the USA, the United Kingdom, and Germany. To provide a detailed view of the vertical and horizontal interactions between these actors, the analysis focuses on a small set of reform issues, including bank structure, bank capital, resolution, and OTC trading of derivatives. The analysis shows to what extent actors at a given political level have both responded to, and shaped reform initiatives in other countries and at other political levels. Consideration is also given to a general shift in international governance, using financial market regulation as a case in point. The final chapter summarizes the pattern of multilevel policy-making resulting from the empirical analyses, highlighting features that distinguish it from familiar studies of multilevel governance in federal regimes and in the European Union.