Some of the listed policy levers seem in themselves insufficient for the government’s policy to qualify as soft nationalization. For instance, that seems true of government contracts and some forms of government oversight. You might consider coming up with another term to describe policies that are towards the lower end of government intervention.
In general, you focus on the contrast between soft and total nationalization, but I think it could also be useful to make contrasts with lower levels of government intervention. In my view, there’s a lot of ground between a hands-off approach and soft nationalization. Most industries (e.g. in the US) have a lot of regulation—and so the government doesn’t take a hands-off approach—yet haven’t been subjected to soft nationalization, as I’d use that term.
(Tbc this is a purely conceptual point and not an argument for or against any particular level of government intervention.)
I’d agree—for many of these individual policy levers (esp. the monitoring & oversight mechanisms), “soft nationalization” wouldn’t be the best term to describe them!
Part of our linguistic struggle here is that we’re attempting to map the entire spectrum of gov. involvement and slap an overarching label on it. “Soft nationalization” gets the general point across, but definitely breaks down on a case-by-case basis.
Right. I think it could be useful to be quite careful about what terms to use since, e.g. some who might actually be fine with some level of monitoring and oversight would be more sceptical of it if it’s described as “soft nationalisation”.
You could search the literature (e.g. on other industries) for existing terminology.
Part of our linguistic struggle here is that we’re attempting to map the entire spectrum of gov. involvement and slap an overarching label on it.
One approach could be to use terminology that’s explicit about there being a spectrum. E.g. you could use terms like “tiers”, “steps”, “spectrum”, etc. And then you could argue that the US government’s approach is unlikely to be at either end of the spectrum (hands-off or total nationalisation).
I think it’s useful to distinguish between industrial policy, regulation, and nationalization, and your new term seems to be somewhere in between. I think your model is generally useful, but at the same time, introducing a new term without being very clear about what it means in relation to existing terms is probably more confusing than clarifying.
Some of the listed policy levers seem in themselves insufficient for the government’s policy to qualify as soft nationalization. For instance, that seems true of government contracts and some forms of government oversight. You might consider coming up with another term to describe policies that are towards the lower end of government intervention.
In general, you focus on the contrast between soft and total nationalization, but I think it could also be useful to make contrasts with lower levels of government intervention. In my view, there’s a lot of ground between a hands-off approach and soft nationalization. Most industries (e.g. in the US) have a lot of regulation—and so the government doesn’t take a hands-off approach—yet haven’t been subjected to soft nationalization, as I’d use that term.
(Tbc this is a purely conceptual point and not an argument for or against any particular level of government intervention.)
I’d agree—for many of these individual policy levers (esp. the monitoring & oversight mechanisms), “soft nationalization” wouldn’t be the best term to describe them!
Part of our linguistic struggle here is that we’re attempting to map the entire spectrum of gov. involvement and slap an overarching label on it. “Soft nationalization” gets the general point across, but definitely breaks down on a case-by-case basis.
Right. I think it could be useful to be quite careful about what terms to use since, e.g. some who might actually be fine with some level of monitoring and oversight would be more sceptical of it if it’s described as “soft nationalisation”.
You could search the literature (e.g. on other industries) for existing terminology.
One approach could be to use terminology that’s explicit about there being a spectrum. E.g. you could use terms like “tiers”, “steps”, “spectrum”, etc. And then you could argue that the US government’s approach is unlikely to be at either end of the spectrum (hands-off or total nationalisation).
I think it’s useful to distinguish between industrial policy, regulation, and nationalization, and your new term seems to be somewhere in between. I think your model is generally useful, but at the same time, introducing a new term without being very clear about what it means in relation to existing terms is probably more confusing than clarifying.