Governing lipitor and lipstick: Capacity, sequencing, and power in international pharmaceutical and cosmetics regulation

Over the last three decades, the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries have become increasingly global. To ensure product safety and consumer protection, regulators in leading markets have applied domestic rules extraterritorially and have joined forces to harmonize rules through transgovernmental cooperation. Yet whereas the United States has long been the dominant player in international market regulation of pharmaceuticals, the European Union has decisively shaped global rules for cosmetics. What explains differences in agenda setting power across the two closely-related industries? We compare and contrast the expectations of a realist account focused on market size and a liberal functionalist argument centered on the role of market friction with a historical institutionalist explanation stressing the relative sequential development over time of domestic regulatory capacity in leading markets. The empirical evidence shows that domestic regulatory institutions systematically shape international market regulation. Historical institutionalism provides an important complement to existing transgovernmental research, offering clear expectations for the origins of and terms of influence within such cooperation. More generally, it opens up a rich toolbox for the analysis of industry-level global market governance, which affects the daily lives of many millions of consumers.