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Jour Fixe with Hans Diels, 15 June 2011
06/10/2011
We kindly invite you to the Jour Fixe presentation y Hans Diels on “Which ideas, which interests? The multidimensional politics of international regulatory policy coordination”. Thomas Eimer will be discussant.
The Jour Fixe begins at 4.15 pm (16.15 Uhr) and takes place at Ihnestr. 26, Room 202.
Abstract
Which ideas and which preferences matter for trade policymaking? When issues are one-dimensional, economic preferences and causal ideas about economic cause-effect relationships will matter. But when issues have multiple dimensions, as is the case for many regulatory policy coordination issues, it is no longer clear which preferences and which ideas matter. A specific type of normative ideas, ideas about which issue dimension should be prioritized will determine which other normative and causal ideas will influence actors‟ policy preferences. This article makes a distinction between causal ideas, normative preferences and dimensional ideas. Dimensional ideas will, simultaneously, influence and be influenced by the mobilization societal interests. Societal interests will try to frame an issue in one dimension at the expense of another. At the same time the dominant framing of an issue in one dimension will decrease the mobilization costs of those societal actors operating in this dimension. I illustrate the plausibility of my framework by demonstrating how an integrated approach focusing on the multidimensionality of regulatory issues explains the policy decisions in two cases of Transatlantic policy coordination: the successful liberalization of services in the GATS and the deadlock in the case of GMO policy coordination. Dimensional ideas are the missing factor explaining under which conditions economic interest approaches are useful and when non-economic factors do the explanatory work. At the same time the importance of dimensional ideas points to the normative embeddedness of all trade policymaking decisions.
