Taking Governance to Court: Politics, Economics, and a New Legal Realism

Abstract

In the last decade, the governance debate has moved from comparative institutional economics and politics to the law, where it has taken the shape of a new legal realism. However, the intellectual pedigree of the new governance semantics and the political-economic changes that it seeks to capture remain under-explored in the legal strand of the debate, which turns empirical arguments into normative arguments. This chapter exposes the unacknowledged slippage between the economic and political modes of analysis in the “law and (new) governance” debate, which ultimately serves to legitimise profound structural changes in the political economy. This hidden function of the governance discourse is exemplifed in the European political and legal context, which has been key to transforming national welfare regimes, which were once built upon a corporatist compromise.