While J. J. Cale was probably not thinking about the regulatory bureaucracy when he penned “Superblue,” there is little doubt that many public servants charged with implementing regulatory policy share the sentiments expressed in the song. And little wonder. Economists developed a theory in which capture was the inevitable end result of regulatory efforts, setting the tone for four decades of scholarship on regulation (see George Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2 [no. 1, 1971]: 3–21). At about the same time that economists were spinning their capture theory, historians riffed on that theme, suggesting that regulation was simply state-sponsored oligopoly or monopoly, born captured as it were (see Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, 1976). If that one–two punch were not enough, implementation as a field of study was born of the desire to understand policy failures too often attributed to bureaucratic failure, with a second “generation” of implementation studies focused on regulation in particular (see Dan Mazmanian and Paul Sabatier, Implementation, 1983). If there is one truth about regulation, it is that someone is always looking for an alternative to whatever form it assumes at any given time in any particular policy area.

Enter Cary Coglianese and his coauthors, who are interested in understanding and exploring the recent preoccupation with “regulatory breakdown.” This multifaceted volume brings together a variety of contributors who write from multiple perspectives—law, economics, public policy, and political science—on various aspects of the phenomena labeled or associated with regulatory breakdown. I use the term phenomena purposely, since there is little agreement on what regulatory breakdown entails, whether it is an appropriate label for policy failure across the broad spectrum of programs that constitute regulation, or simply failure unique to particular programs and agencies. Similarly, depending on where you sit, attributing responsibility for failure varies as well. Some argue that it is both proof and a product of capture, others say it is the inevitable result of policies that create monopoly or oligopoly, and still another camp suggests that it is an unintended and unavoidable externality associated with implementing regulation designed to minimize risk. All of these themes, and more, are explored in this volume. While this is not the place to review each of the 12 chapters in the detail they deserve, suffice to say that readers will find something of interest in at least some, if not all, of the chapters in the volume.

The opening chapter by Christopher Carrigan and Cary Coglianese explores the notion of regulatory breakdown by asking several intriguing questions: Are policy disasters always evidence of regulatory failure? Was the string of calamities that involved financial intermediaries, the environment, food and workplace safety, and more at the turn of this century the result of system-wide regulatory failure, or were they isolated incidents whose only connection was temporal? Are policy failures always the result of bureaucratic ineptitude or malfeasance? The authors’ short answer to all of these questions is that regulation contains multiple, often contradictory, objectives that ask regulators to minimize risk associated with the production process, or, as Erwin Hargrove and John Glidewell (Impossible Jobs, 1990) suggested, much of what we ask bureaucracy to do is an impossible job. Each of the following chapters picks up on one or more of these questions in an effort to make regulation a more possible task. So, for example, Kip Viscusi and Richard Zeckhauser distinguish man-made from natural disasters, suggesting that they are very different phenomena. When dealing with the former, they argue that barriers to information regarding risk necessitate a “shift [of] much of the responsibility for safety from government regulators to the parties generating the risk” (p. 22). On the other hand, they suggest that natural disasters still require some public regulatory response and role, often in the form of insurance.

Chapters by Lori Bennear (offshore drilling), Adam Levitin and Susan Wachter (home mortgages), and Roberto Romano (banking and complex derivatives) focus on specific policy domains and the efforts to reform regulation after dramatic failures. Each chapter offers a nice introduction to the policy area, considers reform alternatives, and says something interesting about the difficulties and, in the latter two chapters, the politics of settling on regulatory solutions. The politics of regulation is a theme picked up in the chapters by Matthew Baum and by Jonathan Baron, William McEnroe, and Christopher Poliquin. Baum provides a fascinating study of the polarization of an increasingly partisan media and how it shapes the debate among political elites over the Affordable Health Care Act, suggesting that such polarization has become increasingly common, endangering not just the possibility of compromise in health care but across a wide variety of policy fields. In Baum’s view, the breakdown is not so much in policy as in dialogue and political compromise, with increasingly balkanized camps constructing their own version of reality and talking past one another. Baron, McEnroe, and Poliquin explore how public perceptions further narrow the alternatives available to decision makers interested in experimenting with different forms of regulation. Attributing public distrust to a lack of information regarding how regulatory alternatives actually function, they perform a series of experiments intended to test the effect of education on perceptions regarding more efficient forms of regulation. To their dismay, they find that the moral side of causal stories often trumps the empirical side, a finding that would not surprise Deborah Stone (Policy Paradox, 2001).

Moving from politics to process, chapters by Jason Yackee and Susan Webb Yackee (rulemaking), Susan Moffit (advisory committees and the Food and Drug Administration), William Bratton and Michael Wachter (private litigation as a tool of securities regulation), Eric Hellan and Jonathon Klick (class-action litigation and insurance regulation), and Theodore Ruger (the future of FDA regulation) examine how the structure of the regulatory process shapes regulation and the possibility of regulatory failure. What they find offers little proof of widespread regulatory failure, at least if one assumes that a systematic slowdown in rulemaking would precede such failure (Yackee and Yackee), and suggests that advisory committees can help with information problems and thus prevent disasters (Moffit); that privatization is not a substitute for public enforcement (Bratton and Wachter and Hellan and Klick); and that the future of regulation depends on the ability of regulatory agencies to adapt to the changing context in which regulation occurs (Ruger).

So what is missing from this volume? First, there is not much in the way of dialogue among the various authors. While they each offer interesting insights into a particular regulatory domain, incident of failure, or dynamic of the regulatory process, they too often miss factors, phenomena, and explanations highlighted by their colleagues that could strengthen or add additional leverage to the story they are telling. That said, I do not mean to damn any particular author or the editor for a sin that all of us commit too often at conferences and in edited volumes.

Second, treating regulation as a purely economic exercise or as an effort to manage risk misses the politics of regulation. One explanation why such different subjects of regulation—offshore drilling, securities, home mortgage lenders, and financial intermediaries—all experienced catastrophe in the same decade is offered up by those who focus on regulatory regimes (see Marc Allan Eisner, Regulatory Politics in Transition, 2000). While Ruger hints that the larger context will matter for the FDA in the future, no one seems to pick up on this in the stories they tell about the recent past.

Truth be told, these are two minor complaints. Anyone with an interest in regulation and public policy needs to read this volume.