Regulatory power over the mitigation of occupational health risks

Under what conditions are regulations effective? The commonplace answer points to administrative autonomy, or the ability for state agencies to independently govern the regulatory space. Autonomy enables power by promoting the development of independent expertise (Demortain, 2020; McCarthy, 2013), shielding from attempts at legislative and executive overreach (Scott, 2008), and acting as a safeguard against regulatory capture (Dal Bo, 2006). Two mechanisms fostering autonomy are most frequently invoked. First, going back to Weber (1971), the classic argument is that administrative capacity makes or breaks autonomy (Skocpol & Finegold, 1982). Agencies have the necessary autonomy to solve regulatory problems when states invest sufficiently in organizational resources. In light of this view, extant scholarship has looked at 1) the historical development of capacity (Carpenter, 2001; Mann, 1993; Skowroknek, 1982) and 2) the conditions through which problems that require state intervention are selected (Armstrong et al., 2006; Best, 2019). Second, in contemporary reformulations of the administrative capacity argument, scholars show that it is mediated by the reputation that agencies draw from their various “audiences” (Carpenter, 2010; Vogel, 2012). A sustained reputation for effectiveness cultivates deference. In turn, this allows for agencies to exert regulatory power.

While explanations centered on administrative autonomy apply to some regulatory issues, they fall short in others. What about cases where high autonomy does not allow to solve regulatory problems? What about cases where problems are solved despite a lack of autonomy? One key illustrative area for these explanatory concerns is the regulation of occupational health risks. For the greater part of the 20th century, public administrations lacked the autonomy to effectively address major occupational hazards in Canada and the United States (Corn, 1992; McNeill & Vrtis, 2017). From the 1960s, extensive regulatory frameworks were developed in the hope of addressing previously unmitigated risks. Yet, these frameworks were deployed unevenly across individual trades, resulting in different degrees of administrative autonomy. High autonomy was helpful to address uranium-related health problems in Canada and the U.S. but was insufficient to solve issues in the Canadian asbestos or U.S. coal industries. By contrast, while lack of autonomy was a barrier to solving the problem of silica dust in U.S. metal and nonmetal mines, it was not in U.S. cotton mills or Canadian copper smelting. Why? These cases suggests that administrative autonomy plays a role, but that it is not the deciding factor. Why does administrative autonomy explain risk mitigation in some cases but not in others? Stated otherwise, what enables administrative autonomy to be turned into regulatory power?

Extant understandings of regulatory power are agency-centric, as scholars compare features of administrative entities to explain outcomes. I depart from a focus on agencies and opt instead for a controversy-centric view, where I compare individual regulatory trajectories, which in turn may be handled by one or more agencies. Two concerns motivate this analytical shift: 1) as previously noted, agencies with high autonomy sometimes fail to solve regulatory problems while agencies with low autonomy sometimes succeed, and 2) individual agencies do not equally mitigate risks across industries under their jurisdiction. I define risk mitigation in soft constructionist terms (see Lupton, 2013), in that there are undoubtedly better outcomes than others (e.g., 1% of U.S. cotton workers contract respiratory disease, while 20% of underground coal miners do so), but that the meaning of these outcomes are negotiated between actors and embedded in macro-level dynamics of issue salience and visibility (Henry, 2017; Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988). I draw from several bodies of literature, including that on policy communities (Laumann & Knoke, 1987), welfare state development (Orloff, 1992; Pierson, 1996), and inter-elite cohesion (Larsen & Ellersgaard, 2018; Mills & Domhoff, 2023; Teso, 2022) to propose a novel account of regulatory power.

I develop a relational theory of regulatory power and conceptualize it not as an ability to impose policies in the regulatory space, but as an ability to reshape social configurations in ways that enable the effectively address problems in that space. Over the past three decades, sociological understandings of power have greatly expanded from behavioral and actor-centric models to a three-dimensional view that incorporates invisible and latent mechanisms (Lukes, 2005). Yet, in that extension, power still is most often conceptualized as a static attribute of some actors over others (Hearn, 2018). In line with recent theoretical developments, I move towards viewing power as a position in institutionally determined relations (Roscigno, 2011, p. 353). In the study of regulations, this shift is echoed in the notion of the “regulatory triangle” formed by states, corporations and third parties like unions and social movements (Afsah et al., 1996; Rudel et al., 2011). The question of regulatory power can thus be reframed as one tied to the development and consolidation of a position for the regulator in that triangle.

Recent scholarship on regulations moves from an understanding of power as an attribute of agencies to examine its relational component. Perlman (2020, 2023) shows how unequal access to knowledge enables corporate power in the regulation of toxic risk, and how that maintains a dependence of the regulator on its regulated entities. Kwak (2013) and Li (2023) show that the development of shared cognitive schemas by the regulator and the regulated promotes cultural cohesion. Anderson (2018, 2021) highlights the role of bureaucrats in fostering coalitions with external experts and corporations alike to cement the role of states in workplace regulation. Environmental sociologists further highlight that ignorance production activities through which risks become elusive and regulatory action is protracted is not simply a strategy by corporate actors or by states but also as an institutional outcome (Frickel & Edwards, 2014; Richter et al., 2021).

This project builds on these insights and tests the relationship between the configuration of the regulatory space and regulatory outcomes. The literature on structural and institutional sources of business power highlights mechanisms through which informal and formal political relationships favor corporate actors (Busemeyer & Thelen, 2020; Culpepper, 2011; Hacker & Pierson, 2002; G. Morgan & Ibsen, 2021). The importance of this literature is twofold. First, it helps theorize why corporate actors consistently gain leverage over states in the regulatory space. Second, the central question of this literature can be reversed to reinterrogate state power: what mechanisms enable regulatory bodies to gain leverage over corporate actors and thus effectively address regulatory problems? To answer this question, I shift my focus away from administrative autonomy and focus instead on the intermediary role of third parties in the regulatory triangle. I argue that the ability of states to effectively exercise regulatory power is bound to the strength of pro-regulatory movements, who act as a mediator in an otherwise uneven relationship between corporations and states that structurally favors the former. Pro-regulatory movements are stronger when built from a diverse coalition where union’s commitment to health is kept in check by activist groups, and activist groups are not buried by labor or shut down by corporate interests. However, the leverage of these movements is largely determined by the regulatory environment itself. Regulatory power thus stems from state action, but it is the result not of its administrative capacity, but of how it shapes underlying power structures in the regulatory space.

In this research, I test the following hypotheses: (H1) When regulatory frameworks enable worker participation, regulatory agencies are more attentive in the monitoring of corporate activities and more coercive in the implementation of regulations; (H2) When regulatory frameworks reduce corporate control over risk monitoring, corporate influence in the regulatory triangle is also weakened; (H3) When pro-regulatory movements are more diverse, they are sustained longer and are more effective; (H4) When regulatory monitoring is more intense, corporate leverage is weakened and pro-regulatory movements are sustained longer, states can exercise regulatory power to mitigate risks.

I use most-similar and most-different case selection strategies to identify industries where states have varying degrees of autonomy and where risks have either largely been mitigated or unmitigated (see Table 1). I limit my geographic area to Canada and the United States because they share similar occupational health problems, notably in heavy and extractive industries (McNeill & Vrtis, 2017), they followed similar occupational health policy trajectories, and policy and technical expertise flowed freely across borders throughout the 20th century (Hoberg, 1991). I select asbestos mining in Quebec, uranium mining in Ontario and British Columbia, uranium in the U.S. Southwest, coal mining in U.S. Appalachia, cotton in the U.S. Southeast, and silica in the U.S. Tri-State District. Beyond my key theoretical concerns, these cases allow me to reflect on the impact of a racialized workforce (cotton), national and cultural differences (asbestos), economic deprivation (coal), indigenous-settler dynamics (uranium) and cross-sectorial problems (silica) on my outcomes. These cases almost entirely cover the regional diversity of Canada and the U.S. (Woodard, 2011).

This project employs a mixed-methods design. This allows for insights from computational and qualitative data sources to build upon each other (Nelson, 2020), as well as to dynamically couple deductive and inductive analyses (Lieberman, 2005; Seawright, 2016). Archival research provides unique opportunity for inductive iteration (Yom, 2015). I will thus use archival data to trace processes of regulatory change for each case (Palier & Trampusch, 2018) and flesh out a mechanistic comparison (Lange, 2013, pp. 101–104). This will allow me to rule out competing explanations for each case and to identify causal pathways that test my hypotheses. Archival sites already visited or to be visited include the British Columbia Government Archives, Bibliothèques et archives Nationales du Québec, Library and Archives Canada, U.S. National archives in College Park and Denver, and archives at the University of Michigan, Berea College, the University of Kentucky, Lakehead University, the University of Colorado, and the University of North Carolina.

I will then perform time series analysis to measure shifts in state discourse using word embeddings (Rodriguez & Spirling, 2022). I will build a systematic corpus by scraping agency documents (e.g., inspections, annual reports) from public agency websites as well as the HathiTrust online archives. In analyses, the outcome variable will be linguistic changes, measured with cosine similarity in an n-dimensional space (Nussbaum et al., 2025). I will be especially interested in uncovering how focused and coercive agencies are in enforcement. I include several predictors to test hypotheses. First, I measure the strength of health mobilizations in each case with the disease advocacy index developed by Best (2019, appendix). Second, I approximate permeability of unions to health advocacy by the share of occupational health-related messaging in union communications as retrieved in official publications and public interventions. Third, I measure media salience of regulatory controversies using a yearly count of newspaper articles in major dailies. Fourth, I capture the strength of corporate mobilization by retrieving expenses on national and subnational lobbying (Walker & Rea, 2014). Last, I specify the region of publication of agency documents to account for geographic variations in enforcement. I will use semiparametric and change point models for time series in line with recent methodological innovations and critiques (Wawro & Katznelson, 2022; Carpenter, 2023). Time covariates will include: 1) year, 2) government change at the national and subnational levels, 3) salient events, (e.g., mine explosion, environmental disaster), 4) agency funding, and 5) inspection rate. Together, these analyses will provide a window into the determinants of procedural shifts at agencies and uncover temporal shifts in schemas regarding attribution of responsibility for risk.

This project engages with two fundamental themes in political sociology: 1) state power, or the ability of states to impose collective will on particular interests (e.g., Jessop, 2008; Mann, 1984; K. J. Morgan & Orloff, 2017), and 2) welfare, or our collective ability to address social problems associated with the externalities of industrial capitalism (e.g., Esping-Andersen, 1990; Polanyi, 2001; Prasad, 2012). Analytically, this project clarifies previously ill-specified mechanisms through which regulatory systems contribute to welfare (Anderson, 2021). My hypotheses suggest that industrial health challenges cannot be overcome simply by developing sound legislation, but rather through the state’s ability to reshape social relationships in ways that are conducive to mitigating risks, and the ability of third parties like exposed publics to ensure the state fulfils its promises. This project intervenes in the core debate between society-centered vs. state-centered explanations of social change, by centering the analytic lens on the mechanisms that make it possible for states to be its primary driving force (Gilbert & Howe, 1991; K. J. Morgan & Orloff, 2017). The bulk of recent scholarship empirically departs from the dominant interpretation of Evans et al.’s (1985) seminal work, but do not necessarily engage with this departure on a theoretical level (e.g., Campbell & Hall, 2021; Carter, 2024, p. 20; de Souza Leão, 2022). In this project, I undertake state-centered questions but shift our focus on how pro-regulatory movements act as a mediator between states and corporate interests and thus provide conditions for state autonomy. In doing so, I show how mobilizations matter for policy outcomes (Gupta, 2010; Roth et al., 2021), and specify pathways through which policies in turn “make politics” (Béland et al., 2022; Pierson, 1993; Skocpol, 1992). More broadly, this project undertakes a quintessential sociological question: what are the prerequisites of social solidarity? Under what conditions do we collectively care about risks faced by others, especially those we are unaffected by? I address its possibility: Under what conditions are we collectively able to do so?

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