| Several important theories of regulation, perhaps especially those developed by economists and political scientists, fail to incorporate any well developed vision of the administrative process--that is, of administrative law and practice. Instead, scholars writing on the political economy of regulation routinely generalize on a plane of abstraction far above the administrative process, typically taking regulatory outcomes to be explicable by reference to legislative behavior. Yet of course particularized regulatory decisions are almost always made by administrative agencies, not legislators, in view of which fact any serious theory of regulation at least implies some theory of administration. This dissertation takes one step toward bridging a regrettable gap between theoretical work on regulation, on the one hand, and legal-doctrinal work on the administrative process, on the other. It first shows that none of four major existing theories of regulation provides either a satisfying explanation of regulatory decisionmaking or a reliable means of predicting regulatory outcomes: Treating the administrative state as a black box yields little. It also paves the way for future refinement of existing theories by generating a set of administrative-process expectations for each theory under consideration, and then "testing" the theories against what is currently known about legal-process rules and participation in agency-level regulatory decisionmaking. Evaluating the theories from a process perspective reveals that, once again, no theory is clearly superior to its competitors. Such evaluation furthermore suggests that strong claims about the inevitability of regulatory failure due to successful regulatory rent-seeking seem unpersuasive. |
