How expectations became governable: institutional change and the performative power of central banks

Central banks have accumulated unparalleled power over the conduct of macroeconomic policy. Key for this development was the articulation and differentiation of monetary policy as a distinct policy domain. While political economists emphasize the foundational institutional changes that enabled this development, recent performativity-studies focus on central bankers’ invention of expectation management techniques. In line with a few other works, this article aims to bring these two aspects together. The key argument is that, over the last few decades, central banks have identified different strategies to assume authority over “expectational politics” and reinforced dominant institutional forces within them. I introduce a comparative scheme to distinguish two different expectational governance regimes. My own empirical investigation focuses on a monetarist regime that emerged from corporatist contexts, where central banks enjoyed “embedded autonomy” and where commercial banks maintained conservative reserve management routines. I further argue that innovations towards inflation targeting took place in countries with non-existent or disintegrating corporatist structures and where central banks turned to finance to establish a different version of expectation coordination. A widespread adoption of this “financialized” expectational governance has been made possible by broader processes of institutional convergence that were supported by central bankers themselves

Blurring Public and Private: Cybersecurity in the Age of Regulatory Capitalism

The protection of cyberspace has become one of the highest security priorities of governments worldwide. The EU is not an exception in this context, given its rapidly developing cyber security policy. Since the 1990s, we could observe the creation of three broad areas of policy interest: cyber-crime, critical information infrastructures and cyber-defence. One of the main trends transversal to these areas is the importance that the private sector has come to assume within them. In critical information infrastructure protection, the private sector is perceived as a key stakeholder, given that it currently operates most infrastructures in this area. Because of this operative capacity, the private sector has come to be understood as the expert in network and information systems security, whose knowledge is crucial for the regulation of the field. Adopting a Regulatory Capitalism framework, complemented by insights from Network Governance, we can identify the shifting role of the private sector in this field from one of a victim in need of protection in the first phase, to a commercial actor bearing responsibility for ensuring network resilience in the second, to an active policy shaper in the third, participating in the regulation of NIS by providing technical expertise. By drawing insights from the above-mentioned frameworks, we can better understand how private actors are involved in shaping regulatory responses, as well as why they have been incorporated into these regulatory networks