In the evolving landscape of regulatory governance, few concepts generate as much enthusiasm—and skepticism—as voluntary compliance. Across jurisdictions and different regulatory domains, policymakers increasingly champion the notion that citizens and regulated entities should comply with the law not through coercion, but through intrinsic motivation and shared commitment to public goals. This aspiration promises to transform adversarial regulatory relationships into cooperative partnerships, reduce enforcement costs, and foster genuine behavioral change rather than mere box-ticking compliance.
Yet as Yuval Feldman’s forthcoming book Can the Public be Trusted? The Promise and Perils of Voluntary Compliance (Cambridge University Press, 2025) demonstrates, the reality of implementing voluntary compliance strategies reveals a far more nuanced picture. Focusing on three main case studies in tax, environmental behavior, and public health, the book poses a fundamental question that challenges regulatory orthodoxy: if voluntary compliance offers such compelling benefits, why do regulatory agencies worldwide continue to default to deterrence-based approaches?
The answer, Feldman argues, lies not in the failure of voluntary compliance as a concept, but in the complex and unaccounted for interplay of several factors. These include conceptual ambiguity around central factors in understanding the interaction between extrinsic measures and intrinsic motivation, institutional and measurement constraints on taking a more flexible and nuanced evaluation of what constitutes good or bad compliance behavior, and cultural and situational factors that determine success or failure.
Understanding the Appeal of Voluntary Compliance
The theoretical foundations of voluntary compliance draw extensively from behavioral science research spanning decades. At its core, voluntary compliance leverages intrinsic motivation—the internal drive to follow rules because individuals perceive them as legitimate, fair, or aligned with their values. This approach stands in stark contrast to traditional deterrence models that rely on the threat of sanctions to shape behavior.
The empirical evidence supporting voluntary approaches is compelling. Research in behavioral law and economics demonstrates that intrinsically motivated compliance often produces higher quality outcomes than externally enforced behavior. When individuals comply voluntarily, they tend to embrace the spirit rather than merely the letter of regulations. This distinction proves particularly crucial in complex regulatory domains where complete monitoring is impossible and where the quality of compliance matters as much as its occurrence.
From an operational perspective, voluntary compliance offers significant advantages. It dramatically reduces monitoring and enforcement costs, allowing regulatory agencies to redirect resources toward education, support, and systemic improvements. Perhaps more importantly, it transforms the regulatory relationship from one characterized by suspicion and resistance to one built on mutual respect and shared objectives. This cultural shift can create self-reinforcing cycles where compliance becomes embedded in professional and organizational identities rather than remaining an external imposition.
The procedural justice literature, particularly Tom Tyler’s influential work, provides robust theoretical support for these observations. When regulated entities perceive authorities as fair, transparent, and respectful, compliance rates increase substantially—often exceeding what can be achieved through deterrence alone. This finding holds across diverse regulatory contexts, from environmental protection to corporate governance, suggesting underlying psychological mechanisms that transcend specific domains.
Voluntary Compliance Strategies in Practice
To understand the implementation challenges, it’s important first to recognize what voluntary compliance strategies actually look like in practice. Feldman’s research examines how these approaches manifest differently across the three key domains of tax, environmental behavior, and public health.
In tax compliance, voluntary strategies include simplified filing processes, educational campaigns about civic duty, and cooperative compliance programs where tax authorities work collaboratively with businesses to ensure accurate reporting. Some jurisdictions have experimented with “service-oriented” tax administration that emphasizes support over punishment, treating taxpayers as customers rather than potential violators.
Environmental regulation has seen innovative approaches such as voluntary emissions trading schemes, public recognition programs for green businesses, and collaborative watershed management where stakeholders collectively develop and implement conservation plans. The success of programs like Energy Star certification demonstrates how voluntary labeling can drive market-based environmental improvements without traditional command-and-control regulation.
Public health initiatives increasingly rely on voluntary behavior change through information campaigns, community-based interventions, and partnerships with private sector actors. The response to COVID-19 revealed both the potential and limitations of voluntary compliance, as initial mask-wearing and social distancing guidelines achieved varying success before formal mandates were implemented.
These examples illustrate the diversity of voluntary approaches while highlighting a crucial insight: voluntary compliance is not simply the absence of enforcement, but rather the presence of alternative motivational structures that align individual and organizational incentives with regulatory goals.
Confronting the Implementation Challenges
Despite these advantages, Feldman’s analysis reveals formidable barriers to implementing voluntary compliance strategies effectively.
The first challenge is conceptual vagueness. Terms like “intrinsic motivation,” “crowding out,” and “regulatory trust” are frequently invoked in policy discussions without clear operational definitions. This ambiguity creates confusion about what voluntary compliance entails and how to measure its success.
The crowding out phenomenon exemplifies this conceptual challenge. While evidence from Frey and Jegen’s comprehensive survey suggests that introducing external incentives or sanctions can sometimes diminish intrinsic motivation, the conditions under which this occurs remain contested. Feldman’s book provides crucial clarity by systematically examining when crowding out represents a genuine risk versus when concerns are overstated or misapplied.
Institutional inertia presents another significant obstacle. Regulatory agencies have evolved around enforcement paradigms, with organizational structures, performance metrics, and professional cultures oriented toward detecting violations and imposing sanctions. Shifting toward trust-based approaches requires fundamental changes in how agencies measure success, evaluate personnel, and justify their activities to political overseers and the public. These transitions prove particularly challenging when agencies face pressure to demonstrate tangible results through enforcement statistics.
The book also examines a series of democratic concerns associated with governments attempting to foster voluntary compliance, including potentially manipulative interventions, the ethics of information campaigns, and the challenge of addressing the heterogeneity of trustworthiness across different segments of the public. These issues raise fundamental questions about the legitimacy and fairness of voluntary compliance strategies particularly when they blur the line between persuasion and manipulation.
Cultural and contextual factors add further complexity. Voluntary compliance strategies that succeed in high-trust Nordic societies may fail in more polarized or low-trust countries. Similarly, regulatory domains differ substantially in their amenability to voluntary approaches. Environmental protection often benefits from cooperative framing around shared challenges, while tax compliance may inherently involve more adversarial dynamics given the economic incentives at stake.
Thus, trust-based approaches that build on enhancing people’s intrinsic honesty and compliance motivations face a fundamental limitation: while they can improve compliance rates, they cannot guarantee universal compliance. This uncertainty makes them appear as supplementary tools rather than viable standalone alternatives to deterrence-based regulation.
The challenge is compounded by the selective nature of their effectiveness. Trust-oriented strategies tend to work well with certain segments of the population—typically those already predisposed to comply—while having limited impact on determined violators. Similarly, their success varies significantly across different regulatory contexts and cultural environments. This uneven performance leads policymakers to view voluntary compliance as a valuable complement to traditional enforcement rather than a comprehensive regulatory strategy.
This perception creates a self-reinforcing cycle: because voluntary approaches are treated as supplemental, they receive insufficient institutional investment and support to reach their full potential, thereby confirming the initial scepticism about their effectiveness as primary regulatory tools
Technology’s Double-Edged Sword
The digital transformation of regulatory practice introduces new dimensions to the voluntary compliance debate. Advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and automated monitoring systems enable unprecedented oversight capabilities, fundamentally altering the enforcement landscape. These technologies create both opportunities and risks for voluntary compliance strategies.
On the one hand, sophisticated monitoring tools can provide regulators with the confidence to experiment with trust-based approaches, knowing they retain the capability to detect egregious violations. Light-touch, risk-based monitoring can support voluntary compliance by focusing enforcement resources on bad actors while allowing good-faith actors to operate with minimal interference.
Conversely, pervasive surveillance risks undermining the very foundations of voluntary compliance. When regulated entities feel constantly watched through opaque algorithmic systems, the sense of dignity and autonomy that fuels intrinsic motivation may erode. The challenge lies in designing technological oversight that maintains accountability without destroying trust—what Feldman terms the “surveillance paradox” of modern regulation.
A Framework for Strategic Implementation
Rather than advocating for voluntary compliance as a universal solution, Feldman’s book provides a sophisticated framework for determining when and how to deploy trust-based strategies effectively. This framework builds on insights from Ayres and Braithwaite’s responsive regulation theory, which emphasizes the importance of regulatory escalation and the strategic combination of persuasion and deterrence.
The framework evaluates multiple dimensions including baseline trust levels between regulators and regulated entities, the visibility and measurability of compliance behaviors, institutional readiness for cultural change, and the sustainability of voluntary approaches over time without constant reinforcement. As Six’s research on trust in regulatory relations demonstrates, trust and control can complement rather than substitute for each other when properly calibrated.
The book’s central contribution lies in rejecting false binaries between coercion and voluntarism. Effective regulation typically involves carefully calibrated combinations. This might involve establishing voluntary frameworks supported by targeted enforcement for egregious violations, or using technology to enable risk-based approaches that preserve trust while maintaining accountability. Baldwin, Cave, and Lodge’s comprehensive analysis of regulatory theory and practice provides additional support for such hybrid approaches.
Implications for Contemporary Regulatory Practice
The lessons from Can the Public be Trusted? prove particularly relevant as regulatory systems worldwide grapple with unprecedented challenges. Climate change, public health crises, artificial intelligence governance, and digital platform regulation all require levels of cooperation that pure enforcement approaches cannot achieve. Yet these same domains involve such high stakes that pure voluntarism seems naive.
The integration of behavioral insights into regulatory design, popularized by Thaler and Sunstein’s nudge theory, offers promising middle ground. These “libertarian paternalist” approaches preserve choice while structuring decision environments to promote socially beneficial outcomes. However, Feldman cautions that nudges alone cannot substitute for the deeper institutional and cultural changes required for successful voluntary compliance.
Feldman’s analysis suggests that successful navigation of these challenges requires regulatory agencies to develop new capabilities: the ability to differentiate and assess contextual factors systematically, design hybrid approaches strategically, avoid binary judgments with more nuanced evaluations of compliance quality, and adapt quickly when voluntary strategies prove insufficient. This represents not a retreat from voluntary compliance but rather its evolution into a more sophisticated, evidence-based practice.
For regulators and policymakers, the book offers both encouragement and caution. Voluntary compliance remains a powerful tool for achieving regulatory objectives while building public trust. However, its successful implementation demands careful attention to context, clear-eyed assessment of risks, and willingness to combine approaches pragmatically. In an era of declining institutional trust and increasing regulatory complexity, mastering this balance may determine the difference between regulatory success and failure.
