Rethinking Regimes: Industry and Institutions

Abstract

Our goal in this book is better to understand international regulatory institutions in general, and institutions for regulating global finance in particular, by analyzing the relationship between such institutions and the structures of the industries they seek to regulate. In this chapter I develop a theoretical framework for analyzing this relationship. This task involves three steps. The first step is to scan a variety of existing literatures for relevant insights. The second step is to draw on these insights to construct a hypothesis that specifies a relationship between industry structures and the strength of international regulatory institutions. The third step is to develop a method for testing this hypothesis that takes into account the grave doubts that are current in the study of international relations regarding the usefulness of scientific testing.