How much politics goes into the development, implementation, evaluation, and reform of regulation? This question has been at the forefront of regulatory scholarship for over four decades. This paper maps how scholars of public administration in general and regulatory scholars in particular have theorized the politics of regulation.

It first reflects on three of the major theories about the need for regulation: economic perspectives, public interest perspectives, and institutional perspectives. In the slipstream of these theories, regulatory models have for long built on the understanding that either deterrence, intrinsic motivations, or information provision are the best way to achieve compliance with regulation.

The second part of the paper engages with more recent regulatory reforms. These have begun to mix incentives (resulting in models such as Responsive Regulation and Smart Regulation) and have started to embrace insights from behavioural economics (resulting in models such as Nudging). This all to develop regulatory interventions that are more tailored to the characteristics of the individuals and organizations they target.

Recent regulatory reforms have also begun to embrace non-governmental individuals and organizations as essential parts of regulatory regimes (resulting in theorizing on co-regulation and regulatory intermediaries), as well as question the need for a (politics of) regulation of regulation (resulting in theorizing on agencification, meta-regulation, and regulatory stewardship).