Transnational Feedbacks, Soft Law, and Preferences in Global Financial Regulation

Newman, Abraham and Posner, Elliot (2015) Transnational Feedbacks, Soft Law, and Preferences in Global Financial Regulation. [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

Pre-crisis global governance of finance was marked by extensive cooperation supported by a preference alignment between the two regulatory great powers, the U.S. and the EU. The paper’s explanation of this surprising pattern in regulatory preferences takes the institutional context of global finance seriously. It highlights endogenous, temporal effects of the international institutions at the core of global economic governance and, in particular, policy feedbacks arising from the interaction of transnational soft law and domestic political contests. In this extension of historical institutionalist theory to the international political arena, soft law is more than a coordinating mechanism. It is an institution that, like its domestic analogues, structures politics over time, redistributing resources and altering contests between competing coalitions. In addition to improving our understanding of historical events and great power preference alignment, the argument develops claims about the temporal effects and domestic-international interaction of informal cooperation in global governance.

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