This seminar is hosted by the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, an Oxford Martin School Institute

Speaker: Brendon Swedlow is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the College of Law and Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability and Energy both at the Northern Illinois University. Brendon is also a Research Associate in the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Summary: Existing studies of the politics of environmental, health, and safety regulation in the US and Europe suffer from case selection problems that have led to widely divergent assertions about what environmental, health, and safety risks exist and how and why and with what consequences they are regulated.

This presentation describes an ongoing project that will for the first time allow accurate generalisations to be made about regulatory patterns and provide a platform for testing how well various theories of regulation explain these patterns. The project will also help policymakers identify best regulatory practices and better define and allocate resources among regulatory objectives.

The project seeks to accomplish its ambitious goals by studying a representative sample of environmental, health, and safety risks through a collaborative research network of US and European faculty and their students using a mixed-method approach called comparative nested analysis. This presentation provides a progress report on this project and discusses how interested scholars can participate.