Utility Commissioners and Who They Trust

Deck: 

A survey sample of regulators on their dealings with peers, colleagues, staffers, and stakeholders.

Fortnightly Magazine - November 2014
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Journalists and scholars commonly devote a good deal of attention to the decline in trust that citizens place in their government. And this worrisome fact should count double for regulatory agencies - those governmental entities whose task it is to provide social oversight of business activities. Yet our focus here points a different way.

This narrative on trust takes the individual state public utility commissioner as the center of analysis and then considers five crucial relationships that she or he might have with other important players. The question is this: To what degree does the representative public utility commissioner extend trust to each of the following groups of participants in the regulatory process:

• Fellow commissioners on the same PUC;

• The professional PUC staff;

• Other PUC's in other states;

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