We are grateful to the editor and reviewers for this opportunity to respond to the five essays reviewing two recent books comparing regulation in the US and Europe: The Politics of Precaution: Regulating Health, Safety, and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States, and The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe. We agree with reviewer Maria Weimer and with David Vogel that both of these books help create a research agenda for comparative studies of regulation, including studies of relative precaution, by developing theoretical explanations and a systematic basis for collecting data to test them. We also agree with reviewer Susan Rose-Ackerman that comparative studies of regulation should examine not only relative precaution, but more broadly the interrelationships among precaution, proportionality, impact assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and other analytic frameworks – and the value choices embedded in them. We addressed those important issues in the concluding chapter of our book, but they certainly deserve additional inquiry. And we thank Fabrizio Cafaggi for his extensive review of our book in an earlier issue of this journal; there he emphasized our book’s contribution to the evolving understanding of transnational regulatory networks. Both books undertake a descriptive comparison of relative precaution in American and European regulation over the past several decades. The two books differ in their findings, and in the evidence on which those findings rest. We thank reviewers Susan RoseAckerman, Adam Burgess, and Jane K. Winn for acknowledging the strong empirical evidence of actual policymaking that is assembled in our book. We disagree, however, with the reviewers who allege that our book has somehow “missed the wood for the trees” or cast “empiricism” against “humanism”, ostensibly because Europe yearns to define its “identity” as precautionary or because European regulation “feels” more precautionary. In our view, it is a mistake to confuse rhetoric with reality, or feelings with actions, and it is an illusion to conflate political aspirations with actual policymaking. That is why we studied actual policies: to test whether they reflect the political rhetoric or not. To characterize the forest and see whether it has moved, one must examine a representative sample of the trees – which is what we have done. To compare regulatory policies, one must actually study the policies and avoid being seduced by aspirational rhetoric and symbolic politics which are not themselves evidence of real regulation. * Jonathan B. Wiener is Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University and a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF). Brendon Swedlow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, at Northern Illinois University. James K. Hammitt is Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at the Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health, and visiting professor at the Toulouse School of Economics (LERNA-INRA). Michael D. Rogers is a former member of the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, at the European Commission. Peter H. Sand is lecturer in International Environmental Law at the University of Munich.
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Jun 9, 2023
Ludivine Petetin 
Open Access