Enforcement style analysis has been crucial in the study and practice of regulatory law enforcement. The enforcement style captures how the law is enforced and can be used to discuss, compare and analyze enforcement practices. Moreover, it can be used to explain why there is variation in such enforcement practices, and to understand what shapes enforcement. And perhaps most importantly, the enforcement style can be used to understand what type of enforcement is most effective in attaining its goals in implementing the law. Since its first usage in the 1980s, in the study of regulatory enforcement in OECD contexts we now also see enforcement style analysis used in emerging markets such as Brazil and China, where enforcement is crucial in implementation of law but where enforcement challenges have been extra difficult.
Over the last three decades enforcement style analysis has generally moved from qualitative and broad approaches recognizing only two or three mutually exclusive styles, towards quantitative and detailed approaches recognizing that styles consist of elements or dimensions. A dominant idea in regulatory theory directly relevant for inspection and sanction styles is “responsive regulation.” This idea originally developed by Ayres and Braithwaite (1992) sees regulation as an interactive process between regulator and regulated. Therefore, we believe that enforcement at its core is not one kind of activity, but at least consists of three kinds of activities: (1) carrying out inspections to detect violations of regulatory norms and to communicating about such violations trying to educate and persuade the regulated actor to change its behavior, and (2) issuing sanctions against such violations in order to stop and prevent them. As such, it is not logical to see enforcement styles as applying generally to both types of enforcement work. We thus argue to develop a way to capture enforcement styles by developing specific style dimensions for inspections and specific ones for sanction decision-making can be distinguished. This allows for a whole new kind of theoretical development, both in terms of whether there is a relation between particular inspection and sanction style dimensions, how different sanctions style and inspection style dimensions influence compliance, and what factors influence the development of different sanction and inspection style dimensions.
In this paper we present our operationalization of inspection and sanction style, and then use it to analyze environmental enforcement practices in Southern China. We collected survey data with local level enforcement officials in the city of Guangzhou, Guangdong province. We seek to use this data set to show how inspection and sanction styles are different, to analyze variation within these styles, and to see how these styles can predict self-reported enforcement effectiveness. Our findings suggest that higher intensity, prioritization, persuasion, and education will predict higher effectiveness. Specifically, when there is less intensity, more prioritization was needed to maintain higher enforcement effectiveness. Interestingly, we found a curvilinear relationship between two sanction styles (formalism and coercion) and enforcement effectiveness, but in a way different from the conventional wisdom in western contexts.
