Bootleggers and Baptists in Retrospect by Bruce Yandle

Yandle- Baptists and Bootleggers in Retrospect
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Yandle- Baptists and Bootleggers in Retrospect
Regulatory economics is among the key prospects in the contemporary operational environment for businesses and institutions thereby warranting its scrutiny in various settings. Bruce Yandle is among the individuals who explored the concept of regulatory economics and its applications in American society. In a 1983 column of Regulation, Yandle published the essay Bootleggers and Baptists in Retrospect, in which he outlined the crude theory about the demand for and supply of social regulation and its impacts on two distinct groups: bootleggers and Baptists. In this analysis, emphasis will be put on summarising Yandle’s essay with an insightful exploration of the industries’ preference for command-and-control regulations instead of incentive-based regulations as well as the application of the theory in environmental regulation.
Yandle (1983) shows that social regulation is a pursuit of balance for interests between the Baptists and bootleggers. That is, Baptists push for various social regulations. The Baptists flourish on the grounds of setting the moral message within the regulatory frames. Conversely, bootleggers are the stakeholders who benefit from the regulations. Bootleggers use their financial power to influence political decisions and the scope of regulations that Baptists pursue. According to Yandle, the interest-based supply and demand for social regulation has triggered various cases of collusion between the two parties. The author gives an example of the effort to protect the northern spotted owl that began in the early 1990s in which a bootlegger (Weyerhaeuser Corporation) sponsored biologists to spot owls and enact laws to protect the birds in various competing forest fields thereby leading to an increase of timber prices to the sponsors. Put simply, the bootleggers and Baptists theory gives an insight into how social regulations are structured to favor bootleggers by eliminating competition or increasing entry costs into various industries. Yandle cited various social regulation eleme...