The course aims at providing the students with analytical keys to understand and evaluate regulatory politics and also with methodologies, models and technical tools to build and organize regulatory systems in economic and social fields. Regulation is commonly absent in the academic tradition in Italy especially as a teaching subject. Although regulation as a distinct field of social inquiry has developed in a relatively recent period, efforts to influence and control economic and social activity have been made for a long time . The course will develop a general analytical framework drawing upon scholarly examination of a more contemporary sequence of changes occurring in the shifting relations between the state and market in modern industrialized states over the last decades . The changes are related to the liberalisation of the post‐war welfare state in industrialized democracies in pursuit of goals associated with market competition. In this perspective what is highlighted is the difference between regulatory mechanisms and direct state intervention.