Timing as a source of regulatory influence: A technical elite network analysis of global finance (Regulation and Governance, 2014)

Rules governing the international financial system are the subject of some of the most intense distributional battles waged in any area of global governance. Who wins and who loses such battles – and why? I develop a novel analytical framework – technical elite network (TEN) theory – which explains the widely varying levels of influence that stakeholders enjoy over global financial standards. TEN theory draws attention to how issue-specific characteristics of international finance – in particular, its highly technical and complex nature – shape the distributional consequences of global regulatory processes. It posits that such characteristics influence distributional outcomes by (i) affecting who claims first-mover position and, thus, sets the agenda in global financial rulemaking, and (ii) ensuring that proposals made by first movers are increasingly difficult to alter at later stages of rulemaking. I provide empirical evidence for the theory by examining two regulatory regimes that are central to the efficiency and stability of the global financial system: the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Accounting Standards Board.

Author Bio

Ranjit Lall is a doctoral candidate in international political economy at Harvard University and pre-doctoral fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government and Global Economic Governance Programme at Oxford University.

The article is available online here. Note: an earlier version of this paper was published as GEG Working Paper 2014/90.