ABSTRACT
Regulation is pervasive in all modem economies, yet it has had an increasingly bad press in recent years, for example, in much of the debate around 'cutting red tape', 'lifting the regulatory burden', and 'better regulation', a debate which achieved a surprising degree of prominence during the 2005 United Kingdom general election. This combination of pervasiveness and apparently questionable legitimacy makes it particularly important to analyse why we regulate: what are our underlying regulatory rationales? I shall attempt to ask these questions in this article, which will proceed through a three-stage argument. First, I shall suggest that the most commonly-cited regulatory rationale, that of market failure, is inadequate either to explain or to justify normatively the range of regulatory tasks currently undertaken. Secondly, I shall suggest that one implication of the
* School of Law, The University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building, Bristol BS8 I RJ, England TProsser@bristol.ac. uk
allocation, but that this also does not adequately explain or justify current practice. My final step will be to suggest a further rationale for regulation, that of social solidarity, drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, hitherto somewhat neglected in regulatory studies, which provides a more appropriate description and justification for much regulatory activity. I shall then conclude by discussing some implications of my argument for the design of regulatory institutions and for regulatory practice.
