Convergence within National Diversity: A Comparative Perspective on the Regulatory State in Finance

The international political economy literature often expects that states end up in regulatory races to the bottom while competing for the most mobile segments of capital. While multilateralism argues that states are able to overcome prisoner dilemma situations by converging on international standards of regulation, comparative historical institutionalists assume ongoing diversity of regulatory frameworks. The paper shows that reforms of banking regulation in the U.S., Britain and in Germany exemplify a pattern of "convergence within national diversity." It is argued that a combination of comparative institutionalism with a multilateral perspective allows researchers to capture the causes and patterns of regulatory reform in finance. While convergence on a certain "hegemonic regulatory model" is due to intergovernmental coordination at the regime level, national diversity with respect to timing and extent of regulatory change depends to a large extent on the existence or absence of institutional veto points in the domestic political system.