Dear colleagues:

In the past year, Policy Currents has contained several articles relating to the impacts of federal welfare policies on low-income families, women, children, and others and discussing the prospects of additional reforms to the welfare system. A short update on the current status of the reauthorization of the welfare system is included in this issue of Policy Currents.

As you are well aware, much of the political and policy-related news over the last few months has been devoted to crooked dealings by top executives of major American corporations. What appeared to start as a story about Enron quickly turned into a slew of stories about the way in which corporations record complex business transactions and about the possible complicity of some of our largest accounting firms in blessing the efforts of these corporations to obscure the true meaning of these transactions from shareholders and the public. It has become painfully clear that something is fundamentally wrong with our current regulatory system as it pertains to the accounting of business activities. Is the accounting industry incapable of regulating itself? Are new forms of regulation needed to ensure that the public interest is protected in the accounting practices of corporations? If so, what conceptual frameworks are useful in interpreting these policy failures and how should the current regulatory schemed be altered?

In this issue of Policy Currents, Matt Potoski and Aseem Prakash sketch the beginnings of a way to differentiate regulatory systems that rely heavily on voluntary compliance by business firms. The paper by Potoski and Prakash is specifically targeted to environmental regulation, but the theoretical point can be extended to other areas of business regulation. In particular, they identify several aspects of self-regulatory schemes that can affect the extent to which behaviors of business firms will be constrained in directions consistent with the preferences of interests outside the firms themselves.

As a reminder, the business session of the Public Policy Section is Friday, August 30, at 5:30 p.m. during the annual meeting of the APSA. Please consult the final program for the location of the business session. Also, please peruse the list of panels sponsored by the Public Policy Section at http://www.apsanet.org/mtgs/program/divisions.cfm and attend as many as possible. The greater the attendance at the panels, the more panels we will be allotted at future conferences.

I’ll look forward to seeing you in Boston.

Cheers,

Ken Bickers

Editor, Policy Currents

Associate Director, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University