This paper presents an empirical account of the diversity of regulatory developments over the past fifty years, and provides a theoretical framework for understanding this diversity. We build upon the "varieties of capitalism" and the "regulatory capitalism" literatures which provide methods for exploring institutional diversity, and hypotheses about the causes of regulatory diversity. We build a theory of political entrepreneurship under fiscal constraints that expands Stigler's (1971) account of the demand and supply of regulations by including deficit finance and public opinion in the analysis. This framework (a) allows the creation of country-specific analytic narratives, and (b) provides a fuller account of government crowding-out and crowding-in effects, showing how the crowding-out in can occur across the entire structure of production.