Compliance costs,regulation, and environmental performance: Controlling truck emissions in the US

When explaining regulatory policymaking and the behavior of regulated business firms, scholars have supplemented economic models by emphasizing the role of public‐regarding entrepreneurial politics and of normative pressures on firms. This article explores the limits of such entrepreneurial politics and “social license” pressures by examining regulation of emissions from diesel powered trucks in the US. We find that the economic cost of obtaining the best available control technology – new model lower emissions engines – has: (i) limited the stringency and coerciveness of direct regulation of vehicle owners and operators; (ii) dwarfed the reach and effectiveness of the governmental programs that subsidize the purchase of new less polluting vehicles; and (iii) elevated the importance of each company’s “economic license”– as opposed to its “social license”– in shaping its environmental performance. The prominence of this “regulatory compliance cost” variable in shaping both regulation and firm behavior, we conclude, is likely to recur in highly competitive markets, like trucking, that include many small firms that cannot readily either afford or pass on the cost of best available compliance technologies.     

Insuring legislative wealth transfers: theory and evidence

Authorities rely on reports from private citizens to detect and enforce more than a trivial portion of effective law-breaking. The present article is the first to study the cultural aspect of peer reporting experimentally. By collecting data in a post-Soviet country (Moldova), we focus in particular on how the Soviet legacy of using citizens as private informants may have a long-lasting effect on their willingness to cooperate with state authorities. We then contrast those effects with peer reporting behavior in France, a Western society. Our results suggest that participants in Moldova view cooperation with authorities as less socially acceptable than their counterparts in France. Our results also suggest that participants in Moldova engage less frequently in peer reporting than individuals in France. However, we also find that less peer reporting does not necessarily imply less tax compliance. Participants in both countries exhibit very similar tax compliance rates. We explain the effect of peer reporting on tax compliance in Moldova using the country's past experience during the Soviet era, when being reported to authorities was common and carried grave consequences.

     

State-led bricolage and the extension of collective governance: Hybridity in the Swiss skill formation system

This paper explores the extension of collective governance to sectors without collective governance tradition. We introduce the concept of state-led bricolage to analyze the expansion of the Swiss apprenticeship training system – in which employer associations fulfill core collective governance tasks – to economic sectors in which training had previously followed a school-based and state-oriented logic. In deindustrializing societies, these sectors are key for the survival of collectively governed training systems. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we examine the reform process that led to the creation of new intermediary organizations that enable collective governance in these sectors. In addition, we compare the organizational features of these organizations with the respective organizations in the traditional crafts and industry sectors. We find that the new organizations result from state-led bricolage. They are hybrid organizations that reflect some of the bricoleur's core policy goals and critically build on the combination of associational and state-oriented institutional logics.     

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.     

What drives compliance with COVID-19 measures over time? Explaining changing impacts with Goal Framing Theory

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study which factors drive compliance and how the evolving context in society –virus fluctuations and changing government measures – changes the impact of these factors. Extant literature lists many factors that drive compliance – notably enforcement, trust, legitimacy. Most of these studies, however, do not look across time: whether a changing context for citizens changes the impact of factors driving compliance. In this study, we use Lindenberg's Goal Framing Theory to explain the dynamics of these drivers of compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic. We formulate hypotheses for pro-socialness, trust in government, observed respect for rules, rule effectiveness, rule appropriateness, fear of COVID-19 (severity and proximity), opportunities for pleasure and happiness, as well as worsened income position. We test our hypotheses with data collected at three different moments during the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in Flanders, Belgium. Findings show that over time the constellations of factors that drive compliance change and, later in the pandemic, more distinct groups of citizens with different motivations to comply are identified. The overall conclusion is that the voluntary basis for compliance becomes more fragile over time, with a more differentiated pattern of drivers of compliance emerging. Public policy and communication need to adapt to these changes over time and address different groups of citizens.     

Singing in interaction

Drawing on a database of 26 hours of video-recorded Finnish conversations from three different settings – everyday conversations among family and friends, instrumental lessons and church workplace meetings – we consider the ways in which singing can be used as an interactional resource to enact the three basic communicative motives of humans: requesting, informing, and sharing. Singing has the potential to initiate joint activities, which allows the participants to share their emotional stances. The usage of singing is, however, more limited in requesting or informing – a disadvantage which people, especially in musical settings, need to deal with. There are, nevertheless, situations where the possibility to choose to perform such actions through singing can help maintain mutual solidarity between participants. We argue that people's distinct ways of interpreting spoken and sung utterances can be best understood from the perspective of participants' orientations to agency and accountability.     

Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations

How do nonhuman individuals and communities come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations? The “or not” of the question is crucial. This is because our analytical approach, drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorizing, is one that keeps us focused on value’s necessary others, that is, the bodies/communities designated as waste or even superfluous. Our aim is to attend to the role that difference and hierarchies play in the production of value. Accordingly, we present a typology of five orientations – relational, patterned positions – nature can take in relation to capitalist social relations: officially valued, the reserve army, the underground, outcast surplus and threat. What our typology suggests is that to accumulate capital, capitalism needs the diverse materials and creative forces of natures ordered in a variety of positions within society, not just as commodities. No such position is without violence and exploitation. To add some specificity to our initial analysis, we consider how these nonhuman orientations are produced in part through law. We focus on the law because it comprises a prime tool for achieving social order and because the law is a crucial site in which difference is produced and the designations of valued and unvalued are formalized and consolidated.     

Local choice of property taxation: evidence from Norway

In a paper published in this journal, Cowen (2002) argues that whenever compliance with norms is supported by the forces of esteem, there is “too little” norm compliance. In this paper, we show that Cowen’s logic is flawed – that when the operation of esteem-based norms is formally modelled, no such general a priori conclusion follows. We investigate the conditions that would be necessary to ensure that esteem incentives for public goods contributions generate optimality in public goods supply, and indicate on that basis the conditions for voluntary sub-optimal and supra-optimal public goods provision in the esteem context.     

Numbers in regulatory intermediation: Exploring the role of performance measurement between legitimacy and compliance

Much regulatory intermediation has come to entail forms of calculation and performance measurement. In this paper we analyze the role of performance measurement in regulatory intermediation in a transnational multistakeholder setting where intermediation lacks an official mandate. We do this through a study of the Access to Medicine Index, which ranks pharmaceutical companies in terms of their access to medicine policies and practices in developing countries. We conceptualize multistakeholder intermediaries as “second order rulemakers” reconciling diverse and often competing implicit and explicit rules across the governance field. We then detail various intermediation roles of performance measurement between attaining input and output legitimacy and enticing compliance among targets. Our case demonstrates how the selective formalization of measurement processes and the related ability to move back and forth from the role of intermediary to that of “ad hoc rulemaker” are important conditions for achieving and maintaining legitimacy. Furthermore, it shows that for multistakeholder intermediaries that rely on performance measurement, compliance by targets depends on the uptake of performance information by powerful constituencies. This illustrates how addressing legitimacy concerns and enticing compliance through performance measurement should be examined as co‐emerging processes.     

Selfish and Cooperative Voting: Can the Majority Restrain Themselves?

At every scale from small committees to national elections, voters face tradeoffs between self-interest and the common good. We report three experiments in which participants vote for policies with real payoffs at stake. We manipulate self-interest by randomly assigning participants to two groups in society with different policy payoffs. Participants in the majority group are confronted by a simple choice between a policy that is better for themselves or a policy that is best for society. Overall, we find a clear effect of self-interest: Participants are more likely to choose the policy that earns them more money, compared to participants in the other group, even when the policy is detrimental to the common good. Simultaneously, we observe considerable levels of cooperative voting among participants in the majority, ranging from 47% to 79% across different payoff regimes. Finally, participants were not more cooperative when voting compared to when they chose between the same policies with a lottery or leader institution, departing from the hypothesis that voting institutions promote cooperative motives. We discuss implications for multiple literatures about voting behavior.

     

Peddling a semiotics of fear: a critical examination of scare tactics and commercial strategies in public health promotion

In this study, we critically examine the ways in which a nationwide health promotion campaign – the 2013 Diabetes UK/Tesco diabetes campaign, the largest of its kind in the UK – seeks to raise the general public's awareness of Type 2 diabetes. We subject a series of six campaign images (including their layout and accompanying text) to a multimodal discourse analysis, identifying the presence of a range of fear-inducing, stigmatising and commercial strategies, through which the campaign emphasises the dangers of diabetes and advocates personal responsibility for assessing both individual and others' risk of the disease. Specifically, we describe, in multi-semiotic detail, three discursive techniques deployed in the campaign to achieve these ends: (1) the depiction of grief and amplification of diabetes-related danger, (2) the promotion of diabetes risk and localisation of individuals' responsibility for their health and (3) the commercial branding and framing of the Diabetes UK/Tesco partnership – including the promotion of goods and services – as a means of diabetes prevention and management. Our findings raise concerns about the moral legitimacy of using fear-inducing and commercial strategies in order to (effectively) raise public awareness of and responses to Type 2 diabetes, strategies which do little to address the environmental factors which are associated with increasing rates of the disease.     

Nurturing regulatory compliance: Is procedural justice effective when people question the legitimacy of the law?

Procedural justice generally enhances an authority's legitimacy and encourages people to comply with an authority's decisions and rules. We argue, however, that previous research on procedural justice and legitimacy has examined legitimacy in a limited way by focusing solely on the perceived legitimacy of authorities and ignoring how people may perceive the legitimacy of the laws and rules they enforce. In addition, no research to date has examined how such perceptions of legitimacy may moderate the effect of procedural justice on compliance behavior. Using survey data collected across three different regulatory contexts – taxation (Study 1), social security (Study 2), and law enforcement (Study 3) – the findings suggest that one's perceptions of the legitimacy of the law moderates the effect of procedural justice on compliance behaviors; procedural justice is more important for shaping compliance behaviors when people question the legitimacy of the laws than when they accept them as legitimate. An explanation of these findings using a social distancing framework is offered, along with a discussion of the implications the findings have on enforcement.     

An analysis of budget compliance measurement in South African local government best‐practice financial management technical assistance programs, 2001—2003

South Africa's local government financial management best‐practice technical assistance program (known as MFMTAP) was to reform municipal financial management; achieve credible, realistic budgets and prevent financial failure. We consider whether a budget compliance procedure, developed by National Treasury (NT) to measure funding requirements compliance with the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) focusing on ‘realistic’ revenue budgeting, improves our understanding of technical assistance effectiveness. We assess a metropolitan municipality's compliance before, during and after advisory assistance. The compliance procedure was robust. Potential exists for wider application to assess best‐practice technical assistance (BPTA) program financial reform effectiveness. The findings from this single, important sample suggest that MFMA funding requirements are not being sustained 4 years after MFMTAP commencement, attributable to either BPTA performance or termination effects. We conclude that MFMA financial performance can be assessed by the procedure, from analysis of the metropolitan municipality performance assisted by a BPTA advisor for approximately 3 years. The analysis raises questions about BPTA program reform sustainability, but we add the caveat that conclusions cannot be drawn from a single sample metropolitan municipality, but a larger sample need be used for further methodology development to confirm its efficacy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why feed the Leviathan?

This is a study about the possibility of self-governance. We designed two versions of a step-level public good game, with or without a centralized sanctioning mechanism (CSM). In a baseline treatment participants play 14 rounds of the non-CSM game. In an automatic removal (AR) treatment participants play 7 rounds with CSM plus 7 rounds without CSM. In voted removal (VR) participants play 7 rounds with CSM followed by a voting stage to decide whether to keep CSM. All VR groups removed CSM. Contributions in AR and VR after CSM removal are dramatically higher than in the baseline. Most groups with a CSM history managed to cooperate until the last round. We do not find more cooperation in VR than in AR.     

Do Citizens Tolerate Antidemocratic Statements?

Antidemocratic statements by politicians have become part of politics in several backsliding democracies. Yet, we know little about how ordinary citizens think antidemocratic statements should be dealt with. We employ conjoint experiments fielded in the United States, Germany, and Hungary to investigate the extent to which citizens think undemocratic and other controversial statements should be restricted. Specifically, we randomly assign antidemocratic statements – threatening electoral integrity directly or indirectly – along with other controversial statements to hypothetical politicians running for elections. We show that citizens wish to ban antidemocratic statements relative to generic placebo statements. Moreover, this willingness corresponds to their willingness to ban other forms of controversial statements that either represent offenses to different identity markers or induce material risks. We also find that the willingness to ban antidemocratic statements is evident across the three countries and regardless of gender, education, age, and partisanship, with only modest differences in the results between countries and subgroups. Our findings thus indicate that citizens generally care about democracy, which is good news for democracy and electoral integrity, but also that they do not care more about democracy than other fundamental values related to material costs or identity markers.     

How Citizens Respond to Outputs,Outcomes, and Costs: A Survey Experiment About an HIV/AIDS Program

Government performance measurement is often faulted for focusing on outputs, while citizens are said to demand more information on outcomes to hold government accountable. To compare the influence of these measures, we randomized 774 participants to receive outcome or output information about a real HIV prevention program, with or without cost information, in a survey experiment. Citizens expressed less support for spending on the program when shown outcomes (infections prevented), rather than outputs (people served). Showing participants the high cost of treating HIV/AIDS boosted support for program spending, but did not make outcome information more persuasive. We interpret these results as partly a reaction to the high per-unit cost of an outcome in an HIV prevention program. But it may reflect a tendency of citizens simply to misinterpret less costly outputs, including serving more people, as if these were outcomes. This bias has implications for performance reporting and accountability.     

Diffusion of Compliance in the ‘Race towards Brussels?’ A Spatial Approach to EU Accession Conditionality

Previous studies identified several determinants that help explain candidate states’ compliance with EU accession conditionality. However, one influence has largely been neglected so far: states’ spatial dependency. Is it possible to observe diffusion to the extent that states’ interlinkages allow their compliance with the acquis communautaire to be assessed? Are candidate states more – or perhaps even less – likely to comply with EU law when other candidates do? The paper seeks to address these questions. By building on existing research on policy diffusion, it develops a theoretical framework for studying candidates’ compliance with EU law over the accession process according to their spatial dependence. The theoretical argument focuses on ‘competitive learning’ and is tested with quantitative data. The results suggest that candidates’ levels of compliance are indeed driven by spatial interlinkages; however, free riding seems more prevalent than enhanced compliance.     

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.     

Production goes global,compliance stays local: Private regulation in the global electronics industry

Poor working conditions in global supply chains have led to private initiatives that seek to regulate labor practices in developing countries. But how effective are these regulatory programs? We investigate the effects of transnational private regulation by studying Hewlett‐Packard's (HP) supplier responsibility program. Using analysis of factory audits, interviews with buyer and supplier management, and field research at production facilities across seven countries, we find that national context – not repeated audits, capability building, or supply chain power – is the key predictor of workplace compliance. Quantitative analysis shows that factories in China are markedly less compliant than those in countries with stronger civil society and regulatory institutions. Comparative field research then illustrates how these local institutions complement transnational private regulation. Although these findings imply limits to private regulation in institutionally poor settings, they also highlight opportunities for productive linkages between transnational actors and local state and society.