ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a broad historical overview of the growth of the regulatory state. The term regulation describes the array of public policies explicitly designed to govern the economic activity of individuals or organizations. By the late 1960s, concerns that safety regulation was being compromised for commercial development led to growing dissent within the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Much of the scholarship on regulatory change—like public policy more generally—is viewed, explicitly or implicitly, through a combination of punctuated equilibrium theory and path dependence. Gradual forms of change are nothing new, of course. When seeking to understand the broader changes in regulation—those that cut simultaneously across multiple regulatory policy areas—it makes sense to work at a higher level of aggregation and focus on regulatory regimes. In regulation, capture theory is essentially a theory of conversion, as agencies evolve to nurture the very interests they were charged with regulating.
