| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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decision making was potentially influenced by a broad range of factors that included external political pressure, new policy ideas, technical knowledge, and the policy orientations of agency leaders.6 Recognizing that regulatory policymaking was more complicated than once believed, political scientists and economists developed a renewed interest in formulating theories of regulation.
By the mid-1990s, two opposing theoretical camps had staked out positions as major players in the regulatory politics debate. One camp, broadly known as principal-agent theorists, developed a highly formalistic approach rooted in economic theory. According to these scholars, regulatory agency decision making is heavily influenced by the strategic choices of external political actors. The second camp, here referred to as post-positivist discourse analysts, rejected formalism in favor of a more interpretive approach focused on ideas and language. For these theorists, regulatory politics is a historically situated struggle to frame policy problems and political interests through discursive construction. Overall, both theoretical camps have contributed important insights to the understanding of contemporary regulatory politics. However, it is argued herein that neither approach has succeeded in developing an explanatory theory capable of accounting for the broad range of variables influencing regulatory policymaking.
This study does not purport to fill in all the theoretical gaps left by previous scholarship. It does, however, use the case of FCC cable television regulation to explore the explanatory power of an alternative theoretical perspective rooted in policy learning theory. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to demonstrating the relative strengths of policy learning theory as an explanatory framework. The following two sections provide an overview and critique of principal-agent and post-positivist discourse theories