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Over recent years there has been a growing concern for the tendency of modern Western public administrators and regulators to overregulate risk – also coined the risk-regulation-reflex (RRR). Too often public decision-makers react to instances of risk with knee-jerk interventions such as increased regulation and inspections. The underlying assumption behind this response is that fatalism, in the sense of accepting risk, is no longer tolerated by citizens and has no place in the current political discourse. This paper challenges that assumption and suggests, on the contrary, that political messages about accepting risk deserve a revival. A balanced perspective can help Western society avoid the pitfall of overreacting to risk.

Inconsistent regulatory objectives may cause persistent noncompliant behavior among regulated actors. Yet, little is publicly known about when, where, and how inconsistencies get solved by regulated actors. The authors tracked the norms and interventions of multiple regulatory oversight bodies trickling down the hierarchy of three utility companies. The authors interviewed and observed managers, planners, operators, and staff studying their responses to regulatory inconsistencies from the perspective of value conflict. Patterns of coping behavior have been identified across the three companies. In conclusion, the authors argue to account for coping behavior in the regulatory mind-set and they recast how coordination may further improve the effectiveness of fragmented regulatory regimes.

This article is a comment on 'Dialogue as a Democratizing Evaluation Method' by Katherine Ryan and Lizanne DeStefano. Their insightful paper prompted us to reflect on several difficult issues at the core of the 'dialogical paradigm' of evaluation. Our reflections focus on four issues: (1) dialogue as a democratizing process, (2) representativeness and participation, (3) the missing link between variation and selection in dialogical evaluation, and (4) the role of the evaluator. Our main argument is that dialogical democracy is excellent for raising awareness and a rich variation of views and ideas, but it does not help in retaining that variation for subsequent policy processes. Research into dialogical and participatory democracy must pay more attention to this missing link. The paradox that needs to be addressed, we argue, is that variation can be retained only when dialogical evaluation also supports selection and condensation processes. The article concludes with an outline of the evaluator's role and tools in providing the missing link.

The governance of the Internet provides one of the most important arenas in which new ideas regarding Internet studies can be applied and tested. This paper critiques the prevailing conceptualization of Internet governance. The label is routinely applied to the study of a few formal global institutions with limited or no impact on governance, but not to studies of the many activities that actually shape and regulate the use and evolution of the Internet, such as Internet service provider interconnection, security incident response or content filtering. Consequently, current conceptualizations of Internet governance inflate the presence and influence of state actors. Furthermore, they undermine efforts to understand how large-scale distributed systems in the global economy can be governed in the absence of formalized international regimes. We conclude by discussing how concepts of networked governance can be applied and extended to illuminate the study of Internet governance.

Somewhere around 10% of all machines connected to the Internet are thought to be infected with malicious software. This has allowed the emergence of so‐called 'botnets'– networks of sometimes millions of infected machines that are remotely controlled by malicious actors. Botnets are mostly used for criminal purposes, but they also enable large‐scale failures that might even reach disastrous proportions. We explain the rise of botnets as the outcome of the incentive structures of market players and present new empirical evidence on these incentives. The resulting externalities require some form of voluntary or government‐led collective action. Our findings have implications for the controversial debate on the appropriate policy measures, where two perspectives on cybersecurity fight for dominance: national security and law enforcement.

Recent years have witnessed major governmental initiatives regarding critical infrastructure protection (CIP). During that same time, critical infrastructures (CIs) have undergone massive institutional restructuring under the headings of privatization, deregulation and liberalization. Little research has gone into understanding the interactions between these two developments. In this article, we outline the consequences of institutional restructuring for the changing ways in which CIs ensure the reliability and security of their networks and services. Neither Normal Accident Theory nor High‐Reliability Theory can account for reliability under these conditions. We then investigate the implications of these findings for CIP.