After Dodd-Frank: The Post-Enactment Politics of Financial Reform in the United States

The financial crisis of 2008 raised the politics of regulation to a new level of practical as well as analytic attention.  Theories of business power and regulatory capture have dominated the literature on comparative regulation, while theories of bureaucratic delegation have dominated the literature on regulation in the United States.  While these approaches provide essential insights, this paper shows that regulatory reform in U.S. financial markets highlights new axes of contention which, in turn bring new organizational actors into the landscape.  In particular, small advocacy organizations have proven significantly more successful in opposing the financial-services industry than the existing literature predicts.   By maintaining the salience of reform goals and deploying expertise in post-enactment debates, these small organizations have contributed to a diffuse but often decisive network of pro-reform actors.  Using empirical material from the rule-writing process for derivatives and for macroprudential regulation, we show that these small organizations coalesce with other groups to form a new stability alliance that has prevented industry groups from dominating the process of reregulation in financial markets to the degree that occurred in earlier cases of regulatory reform.