Making Sense Out of Regulatory Enforcement

Abstract

This study of enforcement of building codes addresses two issues in the growing body of research about regulatory enforcement. One issue is the definition of key concepts. We undertake empirical analyses to clarify distinctions between enforcement philosophy and strategy. We identify two enforcement philosophies that underlie agency actions and that are consistent with prior theorizing. A second issue is the distinction between descriptions of stylized enforcement strategies and what actually happens in practice. We find that code enforcement agencies vary in the degree to which they have embraced the two enforcement philosophies. This, in turn, leads them to pursue one of three different enforcement strategies that we identify. Two of these – what we term strict enforcement and creative enforcement – correspond to previous conceptualizations. The third strategy, which is also one of the most frequently used, is an accommodative enforcement strategy found where enforcement philosophies are highly unsystematic, are only moderately facilitative, and entail little overall agency effort.