I am a CNRS Researcher at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po in Paris. My research interests are in comparative political economy, public policy and legislative politics.
I am currently working on three main projects that utilize a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. The first examines the marketization and privatization of conservative-corporatist welfare regimes and, more broadly, coordinated capitalism. The second project investigates the political control of regulatory agencies and the motivations behind politicians’ decisions to intervene or abstain from intervening in economic governance. The third project explores the political economy of legislative favoritism in various countries and its redistributive implications at the firm level.
As part of this latter project, I am currently building with colleagues (and making available) large-scale micro level datasets about legislative and regulatory processes in various countries around the world.
You can access a recent version of my CV here and reach me at cyril.benoit@cnrs.fr. Below, you can find summaries of some of my recent work.
PUBLICATIONS
Published in Business and Politics.
Business power is thought to increase over time when private actors are involved in the provision of public goods and services. This paper argues that this is partially true – and that in certain circumstances, state actors can even swiftly regain control of sectors previously ceded to private interests. When the latter fulfill some public functions on behalf or as delegates of the state, policymakers face ever greater pressures to sustain a relationship flawed by principal-agent problems – allowing business actors to derive appreciable political benefits. However, these conditions do not hold true after deregulation – when state actors retreat from a sector and attempt to direct the newly created market through licensing, norms and standard-setting. We demonstrate that deregulation sets the stage for a more competitive environment, making it harder for private interests to cooperate. This, in turn, can allow policymakers to enhance regulatory capacities and seize opportunities to highlight the shortcomings of private provision. After establishing this argument theoretically, we illustrate its implications through a comparative case-study of the health insurance sector in two European countries – Belgium and France.
Published in Review of International Political Economy.
As in other countries, regulated savings in France are intricately woven into dense regulatory frameworks driven by explicit governmental objectives. The anticipated marketization of the French economy should have eradicated them; however, a substantial portion of regulated savings has managed to evade this process. Is this phenomenon attributable to the tenacious grip of the French state-led tradition? Not entirely, as another subset of these savings has indeed undergone marketization. The landscape of French regulated savings is notably distinguished by a growing dichotomy: on one side, non-marketized products offered by banks, and on the other, increasingly marketized products provided by insurers. Drawing upon process tracing, we contend that these ostensibly conflicting developments emanate from the distinct and precise institutional dependencies between state and private actors in which these products are enmeshed. The prevailing status quo within the banking sector is owed to banks’ engagement in a mutually advantageous, long-term exchange of favors with state actors. Faced with the trade-off between offering less lucrative products and risking the endangerment of this relationship, banks have opted for the former. In contrast, an assertive strategy has gained traction in the insurance industry. Yet, strategies for the marketization of regulated savings aligned with state priorities have been implemented, even when insurers expressed opposition.
The Regulatory Path to Healthcare systems’ financialization
Published in Journal of European Social Policy.
The literature has often presented European healthcare systems as being less exposed to the growing dependencies on global finance observed in other areas of social policy. This article explores the sources and dynamics of a regulatory path to healthcare systems’ financialization that challenges this depiction. Building on analogies with the case of pension policy, we show that the integration of the private health insurance sector into the European Union financial regulation framework has resulted in perceptible processes of financialization. Notably this manifested in the growing role of financial firms, in non-profit health insurers’ adoption of ‘financialized’ business practices and eventually in a noticeable change of these actors’ positioning in domestic healthcare reform. After having discussed the theoretical implications, the article provides an empirical illustration of this argument by documenting the implementation of the Solvency II insurance directive by health insurers in France, and describes its more general consequences and implications beyond this case study.
Politicians, Regulators and Regulatory Governance
Published in Regulation & Governance.
We offer a series of reflective insights about the state and direction of studies related to the politics of regulation. Notably we argue that the field is characterized by persisting divisions between Americanists and Europeanists. Largely focused on the actions taken by political principals, the former regularly report a substantial politicization of regulatory behavior. Reflecting on recent developments in US politics however, we show that political influence could be overestimated in the United States. Symmetrically, this same influence could be underestimated by Europeanists, who for now have largely focused on regulators and agencies. This is notably suggested by a discussion of recent developments in European politics, as revealed by contributions systematically measuring agency politicization in Western European democracies. On this basis, we identify some promising research questions and agendas for future studies on the politics of regulation.
Published in The Journal of Legislative Studies.
Independent regulatory agency has become the standard institutional choice in Western Europe. Little is known, however, about the involvement of legislators in their design and in their monitoring. In this paper, we analyse ex-ante and ex-post legislative involvement for 48 regulatory agencies enacted in France. We show that legislators debate and design more substantially agencies for which the government bill has already granted them more powers to appoint members to their board, or to be appointed as board members themselves. Once enacted, agencies that allow greater participation by legislators in their decision-making are subject to greater scrutiny, and this even after controlling for routine oversight activities. Regulatory domains matter, though only for ex-post legislative oversight. These results suggest that legislative involvement is selective and driven by strategic considerations. More fundamentally, they imply that legislative involvement could be more important in regulatory agency activities than usually assumed.
WORKING PAPER
Silent Regulators and Noisy Firms (with Takuya Onoda)
In the realm of policymaking, business actors often wield substantial influence, particularly in issues of low salience, where information imbalances can work to their advantage. But what happens when they face an agency with enduringly superior expertise or when a regulatory space is characterized by dual information asymmetries? In such scenarios, this paper argues that business actors are likely to attempt to raise issue salience, while regulators will struggle to maintain the realm of ‘quiet politics’, where they can strategically leverage their superior expertise. To empirically support these assertions, we investigate the pharmaceutical regulation landscapes in France, Japan, and the United Kingdom, employing a robust methodology that combines statistical evidence on the salience of various policy developments across the three countries with insights gathered from approximately 150 interviews involving key participants in the regulatory processes. Notably, our findings reveal that when agencies are shielded from business actors’ influence in closed-door settings due to their expertise, they become significantly more susceptible to political interventions under high salience conditions.