Date:
Location:
David J. Vogel, Solomon P. Lee Chair in Business Ethics, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
David Vogel surveys the politics of consumer and environmental risk regulation in Europe and the United States over the last five decades, explaining why Europe and the United States have often regulated a wide range of similar risks differently.
Between 1960 and 1990, American health, safety, and environmental regulations were more stringent, risk averse, comprehensive, and innovative than those adopted in Europe.
But since around 1990, he finds, global regulatory leadership has shifted to Europe.
What explains this striking reversal?
Vogel will trace how concerns over such risks--and pressure on political leaders to do something about them--have risen among the European public but declined among Americans.
He explores how policymakers in Europe have grown supportive of more stringent regulations while those in the United States have become sharply polarized along partisan lines.
And as European policymakers have grown more willing to regulate risks on precautionary grounds, increasingly skeptical American policymakers have called for higher levels of scientific certainty before imposing additional regulatory controls on business.
Based on the book, The Politics of Precaution (Princeton University Press, 2012).
:: Read chapter 1 (pdf)
About the speaker: David J. Vogel is the Soloman P. Lee Chair in Business Ethics in the Haas School of Business and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Vogel's research focuses on business-government relations with a particular emphasis on the comparative and international dimensions of health, safety, and environmental regulation, and corporate social responsibility.
Vogel has authored ten books, most recently The Politics of Precaution (Princeton University Press, 2012), winner of the 2014 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize from the Science, Technology and Environmental Politics Section of the American Political Science Association; the 2013 Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize from the International Political Science Association's Research Committee on the Structure of Government; and the 2012 Best Book Award from the Academy of Management's Organizations and Natural Environment Division.
His other books include The Market for Virtue:The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility (Brookings, 2005), Barriers or Benefits? Regulation in Transatlantic Trade (Brookings, 1998), Kindred Strangers: The Uneasy Relationship Between Business and Politics in America (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 1995).
In 2010 Vogel received the Faculty Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program.
