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The term governance has been used in many contexts and meanings. This paper assesses three logics of control widely associated with governance, namely multi-level governance, the regulatory state and performance management. It questions to what extent these logics are present, are reinforcing or are mutually self-destructive in their effects. This paper explores the field of meat inspection as a critical aspect of the Europeanized food safety regime and concentrates on the cases of Denmark and Germany. The paper concludes that the three logics of control's effects are interactive and that, far from being mutually reinforcing, the various logics are mutually self-destructive and destabilizing.
What capacities do states need to deal with the challenges of the contemporary age? How can the capacity of public administration be enhanced to meaningfully contribute to public problem-solving? The Governance Report 2014 develops a framework to explore the administrative capacities of the public sector in OECD countries, analyses how these capacities have been used to develop innovative policy approaches to key governance challenges , and explores governance innovations to enhance governance capacities. In addition, the Report presents a dashboard of indicators that assess administrative capacities from multiple perspectives. The Governance Report 2014 advances the debate on the problem-solving capacity of the modern state in the light of ongoing and future challenges.
Unter „Regulierung“ versteht man primär staatliche Eingriffe, die im öffentlichen Interesse sowohl Marktversagen korrigieren wie auch zivilisatorische Risiken mindern sollen. Der Begriff ist ein Import aus dem angelsächsischen Sprachraum und hat sich vor allem durch die EU auch in der bundesdeutschen Politik ausgebreitet. Gleichwohl gibt es hierzulande noch kein einheitliches Begriffsverständnis. Regulierung wird nicht nur in verschiedenen Wissenschaftsdisziplinen mit unterschiedlichem Bedeutungsgehalt gefüllt, sondern ist auch in der politischen Praxis ein ausdeutungsfähiges Konzept. Der Aufsatz nimmt die so entstandenen Unklarheiten zum Anlass, um die verschiedenen Teildiskurse über Regulierung sowie die spezifisch deutsche Rezeption des Begriffes nachzuzeichnen. Die zentrale These lautet, dass Unterschiede nicht einfach „wegdefiniert“ werden können, sondern eine verwirrungsfreie Verwendung des Regulierungsbegriffs nur dann möglich ist, wenn der jeweilige analytische oder auch praktische Verwendungskontext reflektiert und transparent gemacht wird.
In the study of risk regulation, grid-group cultural theory has attracted considerable interest. There has, however, been a lack of a systematic interest in its claims and in methodological issues. In this article, we present five claims that are drawn from cultural theory and assess them in the light of failure in meat inspections in Germany. These claims are assessed through the analysis of argumentation as recorded in newspapers. In the light of its empirical findings, this article argues that the claims and methodology employed offer a promising avenue for further work to investigate the usefulness of this particular theoretical approach.
Conclusion
(2014)
Setting the Scene: Challenges to the State, Governance Readiness, and Administrative Capacities
(2014)
Coordination Capacity
(2014)
Administrative Capacities
(2014)
Crowdsourcing and Regulatory Reviews: A New Way of Challenging Red Tape in British Government?
(2014)
Much has been said about the appeal of digital government devices to enhance consultation on rulemaking. This paper explores the most ambitious attempt by the UK central government so far to draw on “crowdsourcing” to consult and act on regulatory reform, the “Red Tape Challenge.” We find that the results of this exercise do not represent any major change to traditional challenges to consultation processes. Instead, we suggest that the extensive institutional arrangements for crowdsourcing were hardly significant in informing actual policy responses: neither the tone of the crowdsourced comments, the direction of the majority views, nor specific comments were seen to matter. Instead, it was processes within the executive that shaped the overall governmental responses to this initiative. The findings, therefore, provoke wider debates about the use of social media in rulemaking and consultation exercises.
The fields of political science and public administration are said to be drifting apart. This article argues that a focus on executive politics – the politics of the executive and of the execution of policies – offers a key avenue to maintain a useful conversation that focuses on perennial questions that are shared across research traditions. This conversation should concentrate on the ‘administrative factor’ in political life and the ‘political factor’ in administrative life. This article develops this argument in three steps. First, it defines the field of executive politics. Second, it considers the rationale why a focus on executive politics is pertinent at this particular time. Third, it discusses the challenges that a turn towards executive politics faces. This article concludes by considering the position of British public administration in the field of executive politics.
The United States and European Union have focused on improving the practices used to develop and implement legal requirements as a way to improve the quality of regulations themselves. Transparency in the regulatory process, from determining regulatory goals, to evaluating alternative means to achieve those goals, to enforcing regulatory requirements, features high on the agenda of cross-cutting government reform programs that address the issue of ‘regulatory quality.’ This article examines the transparency of procedures in the US and the EU related to impact analysis and public comment. It examines the importance of transparency for ensuring the effectiveness of these two regulatory practices, summarizes regulatory procedures in the US and the EU, compares the different approaches, and highlights the relative merits of each.
A key claim in bureaucratic reputation literature is that reputation has several dimensions. This presents agencies with a difficult choice concerning which dimension(s) they should emphasize in the management of their reputation. This paper analyzes how regulatory agencies manage their reputation through communicative responses to public judgments, based on a singlecase study of the German financial regulator BaFin. Our theoretical argument underscores the importance of different reputational dimensions for regulatory agencies that simultaneously considers their distinct reputation reserves. Our main finding was that BaFin prioritizes responses to public judgments targeting reputational dimensions that are central to its mission and for which the agency has a weak reputation, as opposed to judgments targeting dimensions that are central to its mission and for which it has a strong reputation, or judgments targeting peripheral dimensions. The paper demonstrates the importance of agency missions for reputation management and suggests directions for further research.
Despite the growing significance of fiscal rules, there is little research about tools and practices of enforcement at the local level. Addressing this knowledge gap, this chapter makes three contributions: first, we review the literature on regulatory enforcement in the ‘public-to-private’ context and discuss six key insights. Second, we provide an empirical overview of enforcement instruments across 21 European countries and discuss them in light of those key insights. Third, we present findings from an in-depth over-time analysis of enforcement practices in Germany’s largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia. We find that European supervisory bodies have a range of instruments that broadly follow the logic of the ‘enforcement pyramid’ at their disposal, but there is substantial cross-national variation in the instruments used. The case study reveals a ‘back and forth’ enforcement style alternating between strengthening and loosening rules and enforcement measures. We find political logics, regulators’ capacities and economic contexts as key drivers. Finally, we conclude that the idea of enforcement as a rational application of legal norms is unrealistic. In order to increase compliance, regulators should make more of an effort to understand the underlying rationale for compliance and violations; they need to secure political support and a credible strategy for escalating sanctions in case of non-compliance.
Administrative capacities are required to give effect to policy instruments. While seemingly obvious, policy research has, as yet, not systematically linked these two perspectives. The policy instrument perspective emerged in the context of implementation research and the wider debate about changing modes of governance. Administrative capacities and resources always played a role in this research, but cumulative empirical exploration or theory building has remained underdeveloped. A stronger integration of administrative capacity perspectives into research on policy instruments is essential so as to progress our understanding regarding the choice, design, and operation of policy instruments. A stronger policy orientation in research on administrative capacities can help to address limitations of indicator-based studies of capacity, which currently dominate empirical research on administrative capacities. The design and choice of policy instruments has an effect on administrative capacities: Capacity-reinforcing policies can be distinguished from capacity-undermining ones. A challenge for future research is under which conditions will politicians invest in administrative capacities, an investment that will only yield (uncertain) positive outcomes in the medium term.
This chapter situates ‘executive styles’ within the wider ‘family of styles’ approaches and discusses some of the challenges for advancing comparative research in this field. To this end, it introduces two key institutional dimensions of executive politics that shape executive styles. Subsequently, it reviews and discusses empirical research on executive styles and elaborates on two analytical dimensions for the comparison of national and sectoral executive styles. In a next step, the chapter moves to comparisons over time and reviews studies that analyse the change of executive styles in individual country cases. While a range of (country) examples are used, the chapter draws in particular on European examples and quite specifically on Germany and the UK. The chapter concludes that exploring the varieties of executive styles requires combining national accounts that engage with the institutional and political complexities of single countries, or families of nations, in detail with focussed comparisons zooming in on specific dimensions.
Although scholarly interest in populism has increased as populist parties have risen across Europe, the subnational level has been largely overlooked. This article adopts an original subnational focus and explores an unlikely but increasingly prevalent political agenda: the combination of technocracy and populism. We focus on technocratic populism as a political and governance strategy at the municipal level and assess how the interaction of populism and technocracy plays out empirically in relation to administration and public policies and how the tensions and synergies between technocracy and populism are solved at the local level. The article argues that the local level is especially prone to this kind of intersection between technocratic and populist ideology. While the article is mainly an exercise in concept development, two illustrative cases at the city level, namely the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) in Rome and the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) in Prague are used to support the argument.
This chapter discusses how a classic perspective of public policy and public administration, incrementalism, contributes to questions of the politics of time. It argues that the contribution of incrementalism is not limited to emphasizing the advantages of small-scale and stepwise policy or institutional changes compared to comprehensive reform strategies. Beyond this, the chapter shows how contributions from diverse fields, ranging from comparative politics and behavioral insights to urban planning, develop the concept of incrementalism, and how these approaches can enrich debates on policy and institutional change. In particular, the common image of incrementalism as subservient to existing power structures is challenged. Linking the varieties of incrementalism to questions of politics of time helps to develop these insights.
This chapter studies decision-making behaviour of independent regulatory agencies. Theoretical accounts of delegation to regulatory agencies emphasise that losses of political accountability of regulators are traded off against potential gains in regulatory efficiency. The theory of credible commitment suggests that independent (non-majoritarian) regulatory agencies are more effective in regulating markets than organisations under direct political control. However, independent regulatory agencies operate in a political context and need to demonstrate their benefit to a diverse set of stakeholders, including elected politicians. We are hence confronted with a ‘paradox of autonomisation’ according to which more autonomous public organisations have to take into consideration external demands to a greater degree than less autonomous organisations. Independent regulatory agencies will thus be subjected to high …
Urban mobility policies and the discussion around them have gained traction in many European cities, including Berlin. This policy brief presents survey evidence examining the preferences of citizens of Berlin city on mobility policy changes. The survey covers the expansion of bike infrastructure, the creation of traffic-calmed neighborhoods (Kiezblocks akin to Barcelona’s superblocks), the implementation of a 30km/h speed limit on main roads, increased parking fees, and introduction of congestion charges. The results indicate majority support for more cycle paths and a further roll out of Kiezblocks. In contrast, only a third of respondents support an increase in parking fees and the introduction of a congestion charge. Support and opposition is strongly correlated with education, political attitudes and car (vs bike) ownership.
Despite claims of a paradigmatic shift toward the increased role of networks and partnerships as a form of governance—driven and enabled by digital technologies—the relation of “Networked Governance” with the pre-existing paradigms of “Traditional Weberian Public Administration” and “New Public Management” remains relatively unexplored. This research aims at collecting systematic evidence on the dominant paradigms in digitalization reforms in Europe by comparing the doctrines employed in the initial and most recent digitalization strategies across eight European countries: Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We challenge the claim that Networked Governance is emerging as the dominant paradigm in the context of the digitalization of the public sector. The findings confirm earlier studies indicating that information and communication technologies tend to reinforce some traditional features of administration and the recentralization of power. Furthermore, we find evidence of the continued importance of key features of “New Public Management” in the digital era.
How to do Public Policy
(2022)
How to Do Public Policy offers a guide to students and practitioners on how to improve problem-solving with policies in a political world. It integrates insights from applied policy analysis and studies of the policy process to develop a framework that conceives policy-making as structured by two spheres of action - the 'engine room' of specialists and experts in government agencies, NGOs, research organizations etc., on the one hand, and the political
'superstructure' of politicians, key public stakeholders and the public, on the other hand. Understanding the different logics of the engine room and the superstructure is key for successful policy-making. The dual structure of policy-making provides a perspective on policy-analysis (interactive policy analysis)
and policy-making (actor-centred policy-making) that moves from the focus on individual and specific measures, towards understanding and shaping the relation and interaction between policy interventions, the institutional context and the stakeholders involved or affected. Part I of the book presents the basic analytical concepts needed to understand the policy process and the structures and dynamics involved in it, as well as to understand how and why actors behave the way they do-and how to
engage with different types of actors. Part II moves further into the nuts and bolts of policy-making, including policy design, implementation, and evaluation. Part III introduces and explores three key aspects of the capacity to make good policies: engagement with stakeholders, the process of policy
coordination in a context of interdependence, and the role of institutions.
If infrastructure is a fundamental driver of economic growth and social development, why is it so difficult to get right? This volume makes the case for a governance perspective on infrastructure. This implies moving beyond rational economic analysis of what should be done towards an analysis of the political, institutional and societal mechanisms that shape decision-making about infrastructure investment, planning and implementation. The expert contributions dissect the logics of infrastructure governance in a novel way, providing timely analyses that will enrich debates about how to get infrastructure governance right.
This chapter explores political decision-making relating to infrastructure investments in light of the recent trends towards establishing independent expert bodies to guide this process. The chapter argues that the complexity of infrastructure governance leads to patterns of decision-making shaped by mechanisms of bounded rationality and selective perception. Drawing on the concept of ‘political choice’, it also shows that current debates about such independent expert bodies too often seek to replace the political logic with a technocratic one, instead of exploring ways to increase the intelligence of inherently political processes. Institutional design debates suffer from ‘naive institutionalism’ overestimating the effects of formal institutional changes and ignoring the role of informal political dynamics. Overall, the institutional design debate in infrastructure governance should be more reflective and consider experiences with institutional reforms and attempts to depoliticise the policy process with tools of rational analysis.
Governance Innovations
(2014)
Post-New Public Management
(2010)
Arguing about Financial Regulation: Comparing National Discourses on the Global Financial Crisis
(2011)
As we write, the world is still in the grips of a financial crisis. Germany was one of the first countries to bail out a bank in July 2007. Then, in September 2007, the United Kingdom (UK) witnessed a run on a building society, Northern Rock, and the subsequent widespread nationalization of its banking sector. In the United States, the crisis led to a number of collapses among financial institutions, most famously Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the bail out of the insurance group, AIG, all in 2008.
This paper uses the case of the reform of the German employment administration to explore the usage of performance management approaches within multi-level governance settings. It traces the adoption and accommodation of the performance management approach to govern the joint service centres (called ‘Jobcenter’) at the local level within the multi-level administrative coordination regime in Germany’s federal system. A contribution is made to nascent debates about the potential of managerial tools in systems of negotiated decision-making. The paper shows how performance management is adapted to the institutional logic of multi-level administrative coordination and serves as a facilitator of cross-level coordination.
In discussing some of the core claims of collaborative innovation, this article uses the notion of ‘blind spots’ in a double meaning. On the one hand, it points at some blind spots in the debate on collaborative innovation, i.e. potential weaknesses, risks, and unintended effects of public sector innovation strategies resting on principles of collaborative innovation. Second, the paper considers collaborative innovation as a counter-strategy against blind spots and attention biases of public organizations. Drawing on this perspective helps to critically discuss some of the key assumptions supporting the promise of collaborative innovation to deliver benefits critical for public governance.
Die sich seit den späten 60er-Jahren etablierende politikwissenschaftliche Verwaltungswissenschaft hat eine wichtige Rolle in der Entwicklung der Governance- Perspektive und -Debatte gespielt, vor allem durch das Entmystifizieren überkommender Vorstellungen hierarchischer Steuerung und in der Durchsetzung eines Verständnisses von politischer Steuerung als tendenziell horizontale Interaktion von institutionellen Akteuren („kooperativer Staat“, „kooperative Verwaltung“). Die zentrale These dieses Beitrages ist, dass die Verwaltungswissenschaft, und insbesondere die policy-orientierte Verwaltungsforschung, im Ergebnis der Durchsetzung der Governance- Perspektive, zu der sie wesentlich beitrug, an Bedeutung verloren hat – sowohl in anwendungsorientierten Debatten im Kontext von Governance, als auch in Bezug auf die Erforschung von Kernthemen der Teildisziplin. Basierend auf Literatur- und Dokumentenanalysen sowie Interviews zeichnet der Beitrag diese Entwicklung als Zusammenspiel von wissenschaftsinternen Konzeptentwicklungen und reformpolitischen Debatten nach und zeigt, dass der analytische Kern der policy-orientierten Verwaltungsforschung geschwächt aus dieser Entwicklung hervorgegangen ist.
Urban governance innovations in Rio de Janeiro: The political management of digital innovations
(2017)
This article analyzes urban governance innovations in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focusing on the role of these innovations within the wider political management strategy of the executive leader. These innovations, all of which utilize digital information and communication technologies, are important elements within a leadership and management strategy. The article explores the role of digital innovations within the broader strategy of the mayor’s use of managerial tools as means to strengthen control of the city’s governance. Though presented as an apolitical management style of “what works,” this form of management is also deployed to enforce contentious political decisions with substantial implications for the social fabric of the city. This article offers an analysis of the political role and implications of urban governance and public service innovations that are often presented and analyzed in purely instrumental and apolitical ways.
The Rationality Paradox of Nudge: Rational Tools of Government in a World of Bounded Rationality
(2016)
Nudge and the wider behavioral economics approach has become increasingly dominant in contemporary political and policy discourse. While much attention has been paid to the attractions and criticisms of nudge (such as liberal paternalism), this article argues that nudge is based on a rationality paradox in that it represents an approach that despite its emphasis on bounded rationality, does not reflect on its own limits to rationality. The article considers the implications of this paradox by considering mechanisms that influence government decision making and mechanisms that lead to unintended consequences in the context of policy interventions.
Introduction Among the many promises of reforms of the ‘regulatory state’ type, the clarification of account - ability relations features prominently. While not always using the language of accountability, a major argument against the state as direct provider of a range of public services was that accountability relations were unclear: state providers of services such as telecommunications and transport were hybrids between commercial enterprises and public service providers that were largely self-regulatory in terms of service provision and technical safety (Lodge and Wegrich 2012). The governance of such enterprises allowed political logics to trump economic rationales, and it was unclear in how far the management of these companies should follow either a political or a managerial logic, as they had to provide ‘essential public services’ in an economically efficient way.
Das Buch liefert auf der Grundlage einer von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) geförderten empirischen Untersuchung im Politikfeld "Bauplanung/Baugenehmigung Einblicke in die administrative Handlings- und Entscheidungspraxis ost- und westdeutscher Kommunalverwaltungen.
Es werden die Wirkungen des institutionellen Um- Neubaus in Ostdeutschland vor dem Hintergrund der Fragestellung untersucht, inwieweit und durch welche Faktoren bedingt zehn Jahre nach dem Systemwechsel in der DDR eine Angleichung zwischen ost- und westdeutschen Vollzugsbehörden stattgefunden hat.
Research on smart cities is still at an early stage. The conjecture of this article is that smart city strategies and their impacts will inevitably vary across contexts; however, the debate still lacks an analytical toolkit that guides the exploration of such varieties (and similarities) of smart cities. Combining existing research on the governance of smart cities with theories of business–state relations from political economy, this article develops an analytical framework and typology that captures varieties (and similarities) of smart city policies and governance. We apply this framework to four illustrative cases: Prague, Barcelona, Berlin, and Rio de Janeiro.
Arguing about Financial Regulation: Comparing National Discourses on the Global Financial Crisis
(2011)
As we write, the world is still in the grips of a financial crisis. Germany was one of the first countries to bail out a bank in July 2007. Then, in September 2007, the United Kingdom (UK) witnessed a run on a building society, Northern Rock, and the subsequent widespread nationalization of its banking sector. In the United States, the crisis led to a number of collapses among financial institutions, most famously Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the bail out of the insurance group, AIG, all in 2008.
In the study of risk regulation, grid‐group cultural theory has attracted considerable interest. There has, however, been a lack of a systematic interest in its claims and in methodological issues. In this article, we present five claims that are drawn from cultural theory and assess them in the light of failure in meat inspections in Germany. These claims are assessed through the analysis of argumentation as recorded in newspapers. In the light of its empirical findings, this article argues that the claims and methodology employed offer a promising avenue for further work to investigate the usefulness of this particular theoretical approach.
Kai Wegrich untersucht Instrumente der Verwaltungssteuerung zwischen Landes- und Kommunalebene und fragt nach Veränderungen, die im Zuge der Verbreitung neuer verwaltungspolitischer Leitbilder zu beobachten sind. Die Arbeit beruht auf umfassenden empirischen Untersuchungen in vier deutschen Bundesländern und nimmt einen Vergleich der "Verwaltungsstile" dieser Länder vor.
The article analyses the public attribution of blame and the use of presentational strategies of blame avoidance in complex delegation structures. We theorize and empirically demonstrate that complex delegation structures result in the diffusion of blame to multiple actors so that a clear allocation of responsibility becomes more difficult. The article shows that public attribution of blame follows a distinct temporal pattern in which politicians only gradually move into the centre of the blame storm. We also find that blame-takers deploy sequential patterns of presentational management and use blame shifting to other actors as a dominant strategy. However, the analysis suggests that complex delegation structures impose limitations on blame-takers’ use of blame avoidance strategies, and that sequential presentational management becomes less useful over time. The article uses media content analysis to study blame games during a major crisis of the public transport system in Berlin, Germany.
This article contributes to the politics of policy‐making in executive government. It introduces the analytical distinction between generalists and specialists as antagonistic players in executive politics and develops the claim that policy specialists are in a structurally advantaged position to succeed in executive politics and to fend off attempts by generalists to influence policy choices through cross‐cutting reform measures. Contrary to traditional textbook public administration, we explain the views of generalists and specialists not through their training but their positions within an organization. We combine established approaches from public policy and organization theory to substantiate this claim and to define the dilemma that generalists face when developing government‐wide reform policies (‘meta‐policies’) as well as strategies to address this problem. The article suggests that the conceptual distinction between generalists and specialists allows for a more precise analysis of the challenges for policy‐making across government organizations than established approaches.
Public management reforms in Germany have long been characterized by slow-moving incrementalism and maintenance of its administrative system’s central characteristics. This article reviews recent developments in administrative reforms against the background of the traditional German reform style. More ambitious reform efforts in the field of digitalization raise conceptual puzzles related to the conditions under which incrementalism can generate substantive change – and at what point incremental reforms give way to more rapid patterns of change. The article also discusses the implications of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis on public management reforms.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A large body of literature claims that ICT and digitalisation have triggered broad organisational and cultural changes in public organisations. These changes have led many to conclude that a new era has begun that is characterised by collaboration within intra-and intersectoral networks and this has become a key paradigm for public sector governance and innovation. Yet, empirical evidence of a shift towards “Networked Governance” remains limited, and few have explored further the linkages between digitalisation and collaboration in the public sector. Work Package 6 of the TROPICO project addresses this void by providing a meta-analysis of the design, coordination, and implementation of national digitalisation strategies in eight European countries with different administrative traditions (Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and UK). By coding the countries’ first significant and most recent strategies, we examine whether there is evidence supporting the argument of a paradigmatic shift with respect to public sector governance and collaboration. The final analysis is based on 8496 codes and on an additional questionnaire filled out by the relevant TROPICO partners’ country teams. Based on our results we cannot conclude that a Networked Governance is emerging in the era of digital government, but rather find confirmation that all reform paradigms are present in governments’ digitalisation efforts. In fact, the way in which digital transformation of the public sector is put forward in the strategies may strengthen hierarchical patterns of command and control. Findings further indicate that over time collaboration has changed regarding scope and motives, while its intensity has remained relatively weak. Moreover, administrative traditions do not serve as explanatory approach for country variations in the context of digitalisation strategies. Rather, divergences are explained by the different geneses and purposes of the documents. However, we observe similarities in the perceived success factors: a common vision, cultural change, accessibility, leadership and trust are main recurring themes. Furthermore, we find no conclusive evidence that governance paradigms and collaborative arrangements in the digitalisation strategies influencethe performance of digital government. Lastly, in the conclusion of the report, we address some recommendations to practitioners for designing and implementing digitalisation strategies
One of the manifestations of platform power is the ability of platforms to successfully ignore existing rules and disrupt established patterns of regulation, thereby challenging the pillars of the regulatory state. But while the disruptive nature of the platform economy has often been invoked, it has rarely been empirically researched. We aim to fill this gap by putting the ‘disruption’ thesis to the test. We investigated whether platform companies disrupt local regulations. The findings show that sectoral platform companies are less disruptive to local regulations than widely believed. Platforms face a variety of regulatory responses, including the enforcement of regulations and the banning of platforms that fail to respect local rules. We operationalise disruption as the implementation of new regulation, exploring where and whether regulatory disruption takes place. This article combines a comparative analysis of 99 city regulations in the transport (ride-hailing) and housing (apartment-sharing) sectors in which platform companies are active, with examples from qualitative case studies.