“Regime” can be defined as a regular pattern of occurrence or action (as of seasonal rainfall), the characteristic behavior or orderly procedure of a natural phenomenon or process, mode of rule or management, a form of government, a government in power, or a period of rule. The widespread informal meaning is a pejorative term describing a government that the speaker doesn’t like or that has authoritarian features (The Assad regime in Syria). Within the political science meaning, a regime is the set of institutions[rules] that determines who gets access to principal offices of the state, and how publicly binding decisions are made. The three main types of political regimes are Autocracy, Anocracy, and Democracy. In general terms, in a democracy the most powerful decision-makers in the state (executives and legislators) are selected through periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes with near-universal adult suffrage. An anocracy is defined by real but unfair competition and access, which mean that the will of the people is not truly translated into representation. Some of the impairments to democracy can be electoral fraud, unfair media access, patronage, etc. An autocracy is not representative and can assume the forms of dictatorship, single party systems, military governments, etc.

The conceptual definition of regime is quite broad, but being a mode of rule or management, it is connected to principles of political economy and modes of production. Capitalist production regimes are intertwined with many societal players like governments and transnational courts, they are “institutional framework conditions for economic activity. They structure the production of goods and services by way of markets and market-related institutions. The “rules of the game” of economic activities, that is, the incentives and constraints of economic transactions, will be formulated through an ensemble of institutions in which economic activities are embedded” (Teubner, 2017, p. 84). Within capitalism, there are two main production regimes: liberal market economies (LMEs) and coordinated market economy (CMEs). In LMEs most firms coordinate many of their activities via market mechanisms, while, in CMEs a typical firm’s relations with other actors turn more heavily on strategic coordination (Hall, 2001). If we consider labor institutions and their connection to regimes of production, research points out that companies in CMEs tend to make “extensive use of specific skills, while those in LMEs rely on general skills can be used to explain, not only cross-national variations in firm strategy but also national differences in educational systems, social policy regimes, and gender segmentation across occupations” (5). 

We are seeing how varieties of capitalism are determined by specific regimes of productions, but also by their interaction with other institutions. These institutions are regimes themselves, as they implement a set of procedures that influence the movement of capital. Important players in the capitalist game are transnational arbitration courts like the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the United Nation Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) (Cutler & Dietz 2017). These courts are crucial in the regulation of international trade as their rulings end up affecting the movement of capital across nation-states, as well as the relationships among institutions worldwide. These juridical regimes can go as far as weighing in contractual disputes between firms and entire countries. Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is an instrument that allows an investor to bring a case directly against the country hosting its investment, without the intervention of the government of the investor’s country of origin. This juridical regime has emerged as a concrete example of the private transnational governance by contract involving a complex network of private and public authorities that link local and global politico-legal orders within dense contractual agreements (Cutler & Dietz 2017). ISDS contractual disputes are arbitrated by private ad hoc tribunals established either under the auspices of the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) (Nichols 2018). The establishment and the development of these transnational courts are a response to the growth of capitalism beyond the borders of the nation-states, the production regimes presented above have their “historical sources in the old unity of nation-state and national economy. However, with the dominance of transnational enterprises and their subsidiaries, and with the globalization of markets and their differentiation into various branches, this unity has been broken. The production regimes have expanded beyond their territorial state borders” (Teubner 2017, 84). Yet, international trade tribunals are also active contributors of such expansion due to their procedural bypassing of state law.

Bibliography

Beckers, A., and Kawakami, M. T. “Why Domestic Enforcement of Private Regulation Is (Not) the Answer: Making and Questioning the Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Codes.” Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 1-13. Indiana University Press.

Cutler, A. C., and Dietz, T. The Politics of Private Transnational Governance by Contract. 1st ed. Routledge, 2017.

Hall, P. A., and Soskice, D. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2003.

Nichols, S. “Expanding Property Rights under Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS): Class Struggle in the Era of Transnational Capital.” Review of International Political Economy 25, no. 2 (2018): 243-269. doi:10.1080/09692290.2018.1431561.

Teubner, G. “Corporate Codes in the Varieties of Capitalism: How Their Enforcement Depends on the Differences Among Production Regimes.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 24, no. 1 (2017): 81-97. Indiana University Press.