Disentangling Leviathan on its home turf: Authority foundations, policy instruments, and the making of security

Andreas Kruck and Moritz Weiss

Regulation & Governance, 2025, vol. 19, issue 1, 146-160

Abstract: Making security has been Leviathan's home turf and its prime responsibility. Yet, while security states in advanced democracies share this uniform purpose, there is vast variation in how they legitimize and how they make security policies. First, the political authority of elected policy‐makers is sometimes superseded by the epistemic authority of experts. Second, states make security, in some instances, by drawing on their own capacities, whereas in other fields they rely on rules to manage non‐state actors. Based on this variation in authority foundations and policy instruments, we disentangle Leviathan into different types of (i) positive, (ii) managing, (iii) technocratic, and (iv) regulatory security states. Our typology helps better understand contemporary security policy‐making; it advances regulatory governance theory by conceptualizing the relationship between expertise and rules in a complex and contested issue area; and it provides insights into the “new economic security state” and the domestic underpinnings of weaponized interdependence.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12594

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:reggov:v:19:y:2025:i:1:p:146-160

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Regulation & Governance from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().