A comparative analysis of Inspector responses to complaints about psychosocial and physical hazards

Work Health and Safety Inspectors are at the forefront of efforts to protect workers from harm from psychosocial hazards, yet the application of regulatory theory to their practice has been limited. Drawing on models of responsive regulation and strategic enforcement, we analyze extensive (N = 46,348) complaint and incident notification data from an Australian Work Health and Safety Inspectorate, to compare Inspectors' responses to psychosocial versus non-psychosocial hazards. We found psychosocial hazards were less likely to be actioned than non-psychosocial hazards. When they were actioned, psychosocial hazards saw more Inspector activity, but fewer enforcement notices than non-psychosocial hazards. These findings are inconsistent with the version of responsive regulation espoused by the regulator. Our theoretical conclusion is that Weil's strategic enforcement approach is likely to offer greater possibilities for guiding future resource allocation.     

Authoritarian but responsive: Local regulation of industrial energy efficiency in Jiangsu,China

Regulatory behavior and effectiveness in authoritarian settings are subject to alternative characterizations. By tracing enforcement processes through a variety of case studies, this article proposes and refines a new model, at least with respect to energy efficiency regulations in China: authoritarian but responsive. Local rulemaking and operationalization is authoritarian, with strong and coordinative bodies of regulation, strategic plans, and active involvement of local authorities. Local authorities, however, often find themselves facing a welter of laws imposed on companies that create competing priorities for these local officials who then must struggle to find pragmatic solutions. On numerous occasions, such satisficing behavior by local officials makes them responsive to the performance and demands of regulated firms. Embedded in the decentralized authoritarian context, the authoritarian but responsive approach is found to be a rational choice of local governments and different from previous conceptualizations. It helps local governments coordinate across a diverse array of regulatory issues. Drawing on environmental enforcement in China, the model provides consistent explanations for the seemingly changing and discretionary enforcement incidents.     

From support to pressure: The dynamics of social and governmental influences on environmental law enforcement in Guangzhou City,China

This paper examines how changes in governmental and social influences affect environmental enforcement in Guangzhou city, China, between 2000 and 2006. The paper finds that a form of “decentered regulation” has developed. Regulatory enforcement is no longer the sole affair of the government and the regulatory bureaucracy, but has been increasingly influenced by societal forces. The transformation over time shows the promises and limits of decentered regulation in Guangzhou's dynamic authoritarian setting. Analyzing a set of longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews, the paper finds that by 2006, the rise of civil society and its increased support for protecting the environment had a double‐edged impact on the enforcement of environmental regulations. The paper demonstrates that on the one hand, by 2006, when government support for enforcement was low, societal forces developed an ability to counterbalance such lack of governmental support and positively influence enforcement. However, it also shows that when government support was high, a concurrent rise in societal support created a negative effect on enforcement. Thus too much societal support can become an enforcement burden.     

Can decision transparency increase citizen trust in regulatory agencies? Evidence from a representative survey experiment

Decision transparency is often proposed as a way to maintain or even increase citizen trust, yet this assumption is still untested in the context of regulatory agencies. We test the effect of transparency of a typical decision tradeoff in regulatory enforcement: granting forbearance or imposing a sanction. We employed a representative survey experiment (n = 1,546) in which we test the effect of transparency in general (providing information about a decision or not) and the effect of specific types of transparency (process or rationale transparency). We do this for agencies supervising financial markets, education, and health care. We find that overall decision transparency significantly increases citizen trust in only two of the three agencies. Rationale transparency has a more pronounced positive effect only for the Education Inspectorate. We conclude that the overall effect of decision transparency is positive but that the nature of the regulatory domain may weaken or strengthen this effect.     

Political support among winners and losers: Within- and between-country effects of structure,process and performance in Europe

Why is the winner-loser gap in political support wider in some countries and narrower in others? Previous studies have focused on how the input side of political systems (i.e., the institutional structure) affects the winner-loser gap. This study suggests that one should also consider the output side (i.e., the quality of political process and economic performance) and posits that two mechanisms – rational and psychological – can explain how output factors affect the gap. Going beyond previous research, this article also considers whether contextual characteristics explain the variation in the gap not only between countries, but also within them. Applying mixed models to survey data from 30 European countries between 2002 and 2015, the study finds that the differences in support between winners and losers across countries are smaller in consensual systems, as in these contexts the support among losers is higher. However, changes in the institutional structure do not explain the over-time variation in the winner-loser gap. Moreover, increasing quality of process and economic performance do not attenuate the gap across countries and over time, as they affect positively the political support of both winners and losers. The study shows which contextual factors explain the winner-loser gap and points to the conditions that increase losers’ consent, which is a crucial element of democratic legitimacy.     

Campaign‐Style Enforcement and Regulatory Compliance

This article examines the recoupling mechanism of campaign‐style enforcement and its effects on environmental regulatory compliance. Drawing on the policy implementation literature and institutional theory, the authors develop a conceptual model of campaign‐style enforcement in which both resource mobilization and power redistribution are theorized to address decoupling problems in regulatory compliance. The two‐pathway recoupling mechanism is evidenced by an empirical investigation of the implementation of China's energy conservation and emission reduction policy as part of that country's 11th Five‐Year Plan. Findings suggest that campaign‐style enforcement can effectively improve regulatory compliance when it addresses the efficiency/legitimacy conflict by providing policy incentives and reorganizing a clear hierarchy of political authority. The article concludes with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of campaign‐style enforcement.     

Participation rationales,regulatory enforcement,and compliance motivations in a voluntary program context

This article extends the study of regulatory compliance motivations from “traditional” regulatory settings to a government-sponsored voluntary one. We argue that the rationale(s) which motivate participants to engage a voluntary program likely shape which motivations drive them toward (or away from) program compliance. Our study examines the possible influence of program participation rationales alongside that of regulatory agents' enforcement styles and strategies. Leveraging a national survey of certified United States Department of Agriculture organic producers, we find that the more a producer pursues organic certification to increase profits, the more likely they are to report deterrent fears as an important compliance motivation. In contrast, the more a producer becomes certified to support the organic movement, the more heavily they weigh a personal sense of duty to comply. We discuss the implications of these, and other, study findings for compliance motivations theory and voluntary program integrity.     

Uber Über regulation? Regulatory change following the emergence of new technologies in the taxi market

Can emerging technologies transform not only markets, but also foster new regulatory change mechanisms? In the context of prevailing theories of regulatory change, this article explores the extent to which an interest‐based explanation can account for the regulatory responses toward emerging Transportation Network Companies (TNCs). Based on a primary cross‐city analysis of the 40 largest cities in the United States, the study found that although the existence of ex ante interest groups indeed somewhat limited the extent of ex post regulatory acceptance of TNCs, regulators seemed to prefer the newcomers over existing incumbents and approved TNCs in 77.5 percent of the examined cities, rarely pursuing harsh enforcement even when TNCs operated illegally. The research attempts to explain this intriguing phenomenon by extending the interest‐based approach to account for the key role played by “technological regulatory entrepreneurs.” The entrepreneurs bridged collective action barriers by becoming the central agent that managed, and reaped the benefits of, the collective action, by lowering the organizational costs and by disseminating information effectively and turning consumers into political campaigners, thus successfully promoting regulatory change.     

BUILDING ENFORCEMENT CAPACITY: EVIDENCE FROM THE MEXICAN CIVIL SERVICE REFORM

Building enforcement capacity, that is, attaining and sustaining control in order to implement changes, is crucial for the success of public management reforms. However, this aspect of public management reform does not receive much theoretical or empirical attention. This paper analyzes the process of building enforcement capacity for the case of the Mexican Professional Civil Service reform. Although this reform experienced several complications (e.g., limited support, resources, and credibility), important goals were attained and some control was achieved. We study how officials attained control over implementation through the adaptive management of combinations of different types of control strategies (regulatory, normative, and procedural). The case study, focused on the analysis of in‐depth interviews with the highest officials involved in the implementation of this reform, finds evidence for three combinations of strategies next to a general pattern characterized by a trade‐off between compliance and coordination. This trade‐off shows that the process of building enforcement capacity may affect the goals of the reform, deviating from lawmakers' original intentions Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The politics of regulatory enforcement and compliance: Theorizing and operationalizing political influences

There is broad consensus in the literature on regulatory enforcement and compliance that politics matters. However, there is little scholarly convergence on what politics is or rigorous theorization and empirical testing of how politics matters. Many enforcement and compliance studies omit political variables altogether. Among those that address political influences on regulatory outcomes, politics has been defined in myriad ways and, too often, left undefined. Even when political constructs are explicitly operationalized, the mechanisms by which they influence regulatory outcomes are thinly hypothesized or simply ignored. If politics is truly as important to enforcement and compliance outcomes as everyone in the field seems to agree, regulatory scholarship must make a more sustained and systematic effort to understand their relationship, because overlooking this connection risks missing what is actually driving regulatory outcomes. This article examines how the construct of “politics” has been conceptualized in regulatory theory and analyzes how it has been operationalized in empirical studies of regulatory enforcement and compliance outcomes. It brings together scholarship across disciplines that rarely speak but have much to say to one another on this subject in order to constitute a field around the politics of regulation. The goal is to sharpen theoretical and empirical understandings of when and how regulation works by better accounting for the role politics plays in its enforcement.     

Working with Complexity: Community Engagement and the Murdi Paaki COAG Trial 2002–2007

Achieving improvements in indigenous health and education and reducing the incidence of crime and domestic violence in indigenous communities has proved heartbreakingly difficult. The Murdi Paaki COAG trial in western NSW aimed to break this pattern of failure by tailoring flexible Commonwealth and State government support to indigenous communities, working within a framework of shared responsibility. In this article we assess the trial as a policy strategy by comparing outcomes and patterns of outcomes across the sixteen communities. We found that the strategy worked best where ‘good enough’ governance was aligned with flexibility, rather than with control. This way of working is difficult for governments as it can be a slow process, and requires stability in the policy and engagement framework to deliver results. More broadly, our findings confirm the usefulness of complexity theory to illuminate and to explain the evolution of process in administrative contexts involving networked governance.     

Gorillas in the closet? Public and private actors in the enforcement of transnational private regulation

This paper examines to what extent the background presence of state regulatory capacity – at times referred to as the “regulatory gorilla in the closet” – is a necessary precondition for the effective enforcement of transnational private regulation. By drawing on regulatory regimes in the areas of advertising and food safety, it identifies conditions under which (the potential of) public regulatory intervention can bolster the capacity of private actors to enforce transnational private regulation. These involve the overlap between norms, objectives, and interests of public and private regulation; the institutional design of regulatory enforcement; compliance with due process standards; and information management and data sharing. The paper argues that while public intervention remains important for the effective enforcement of transnational private regulation, governmental actors – both national and international – should create the necessary preconditions to strengthen private regulatory enforcement, as it can also enhance their own regulatory capacity, in particular, in transnational contexts.     

Coercion,Information, and the Success of Sanction Threats

This article explores when and why sanction threats succeed in extracting concessions from the targeted country. We focus on two different, albeit not mutually exclusive, mechanisms that can explain the success of sanction threats. The first mechanism relates to incomplete information regarding the sanctioner's determination to impose sanctions and suggests that threats help to extract concessions by revealing the sanctioner's resolve. The second mechanism underscores the direct impact of common interest between the two countries and explains the success of sanction threats by the targeted country's greater dependence on this link between the two countries and the sanctioner's ability to exploit this dependence. We test the hypotheses using a new strategic structural estimator. Our results provide no evidence in favor of the informational hypothesis, while lending robust support for the coercive hypothesis.     

Strategies of mainstream parties towards their right-wing populist challengers: Denmark,Norway, Sweden and Finland in comparison

Although right-wing populist parties (RPPs) have established themselves in most European countries, the academic discourse on political strategies towards them has been slow to start. This article compares the strategic reactions of the mainstream parties in the Nordic countries. The main findings are threefold: (1) in Denmark, Norway and Finland there has been a gradual change from various disengage to engage strategies over time, while in Sweden there has always been a strong cordon sanitaire; (2) one key difference has been in the speed and extent of the strategy changes; and (3) the choice of strategies, which is a very complex process, can be traced back to a combination of factors at the individual, party and systemic levels. There is a need for more research into the impacts and effectiveness of the strategies, the timing of the choice of strategies and the potential learning effects of political parties.     

Lingering environmental pessimism and the role of government in Hong Kong

Based on data from two opinion surveys conducted in 2000 and 2008, this study shows that Hong Kong people have been consistently highly aware of the seriousness of different environmental problems and relatively pessimistic about the future resolution of these problems. Such pessimism is arguably related to their lack of confidence in the government's enforcement of environmental protection. Through an analysis of the environmental policy‐making and enforcement agency and three selected enforcement cases, the study further finds that the people's lack of confidence can be traced to the government's failure to bring about a comprehensive, integrated, far‐sighted environmental strategy with sophisticated institutional support and detailed enforcement mechanisms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Transformation of organic regulation: The ambiguous effects of publicization

The regulatory regime for organic products is different from other non‐state‐market driven (NSMD) regimes because it is the only one that evolved from a purely private into a regime where the establishment of minimum standards has become the monopoly of public powers. This article is the first to study the effects of the process of publicization, a term coined to characterize the transformation of private into public standards. The central hypothesis studied is that the process of publicization has empowerment and containment effects at the same time. To test the hypothesis the article analyses the effects of publicization on regulatory capabilities of private regulators as well as on the quality of the standards. The effects of publicization are further explored by comparing the legal and institutional architecture that shapes the coexistence of private and public regimes in the EU and the US, showing important differences between the two systems. The article offers a new perspective to look at the dynamic interaction between private and public regulation and its findings are of general relevance for the debate on the desirability of governmental intervention on private regulatory schemes.     

Regulatory enforcement against organizational insiders: Interactions in the pursuit of individual accountability

The UK Financial Conduct Authority has developed and implemented policies targeting individuals for regulatory non-compliance in the post-2008 crisis period. This article develops a tripartite framework that differentiates between individual–firm, regulator–individual, and regulator–firm interactions to capture the complexity of these enforcement proceedings. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders, administrative decisionmaking observations, and documentary analysis, it outlines the process of individualizing responsibility for non-compliance and finds that this approach poses evidential and investigative challenges for the regulator as a result of individual and corporate responses. The evidence shows that individuals are more likely than firms to engage in an adversarial response to an investigation rather than to settle. At the same time, through an inverse process of “corporatization” of the enforcement proceedings, firms may employ resources and strategies aimed at obscuring individual responsibility or binding together more closely the corporate and the individual case. The article concludes that the prospects of a successful outcome in investigating individuals depend not only on regulators' activities but also on corporate responses and on which managers are considered assets to the firm and which may be thrown to the wolves.     

The Distributive Politics of Enforcement

Why do some politicians tolerate the violation of the law? In contexts where the poor are the primary violators of property laws, I argue that the answer lies in the electoral costs of enforcement: Enforcement can decrease support from poor voters even while it generates support among nonpoor voters. Using an original data set on unlicensed street vending and enforcement operations at the subcity district level in three Latin American capital cities, I show that the combination of voter demographics and electoral rules explains enforcement. Supported by qualitative interviews, these findings suggest how the intentional nonenforcement of law, or forbearance, can be an electoral strategy. Dominant theories based on state capacity poorly explain the results.     

State Executive Orders: Nuance in Restrictions,Revealing Suspensions,and Decisions to Enforce

In the absence of a large-scale federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local elected officials have enacted executive orders that include restrictions on public liberties as well as the suspension of rules and regulations. While these restrictive policy actions have received extensive media attention, the suspensions, including regulatory rollbacks, waivers, and extensions, are lesser known. This Viewpoint essay offers insight from a working database that captures the nuance and variation across restrictions, suspensions, and enforcement mechanisms being utilized at the state level.