Disrupting Regulation, Regulating Disruption

The Politics of Uber in the United States

Bibliographic Data

ID6318643
AuthorsRuth Berins Collier (0000-0001-9179-4157), Veena Dubal (0000-0001-8116-6392), B Dubal, V B Dubal, C L Carter (0000-0002-9472-1364)
Year2018
Volume16
Issue4
Pages919-937
Publication date2018-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePerspectives on Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1537-5927 • E-ISSN: 1541-0986
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1537592718001093
OpenAlexW2901767511
LanguageEN
Citations received71
References cited12

Platform companies disrupt not only the economic sectors they enter, but also the regulatory regimes that govern those sectors. We examine Uber in the United States as a case of regulating this disruption in different arenas: cities, state legislatures, and judicial venues. We find that the politics of Uber regulation does not conform to existing models of regulation. We describe instead a pattern of “disruptive regulation”, characterized by a challenger-incumbent cleavage, in two steps. First, an existing regulatory regime is not deregulated but successfully disregarded by a new entrant. Second, the politics of subsequently regulating the challenger leads to a dual regulatory regime. In the case of Uber, disruptive regulation takes the form of challenger capture, an elite-driven pattern, in which the challenger has largely prevailed. It is further characterized by the surrogate representation of dispersed actors—customers and drivers—who do not have autonomous power and who rely instead on shifting alignments with the challenger and incumbent. In its surrogate capacity in city and state regulation, Uber has frequently mobilized large numbers of customers and drivers to lobby for policy outcomes that allow it to continue to provide service on terms it finds acceptable. Because drivers have reaped less advantage from these alignments, labor issues have been taken up in judicial venues, again primarily by surrogates (usually plaintiffs’ attorneys) but to date have not been successful

Barriers to entry · Business · Economics · Elite · Industrial organization · Law and economics · Legislature · Market economy · Market structure · Plaintiff · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · State (computer science · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Law · Sharing Economy and Platforms · Taxation and Compliance Studies

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