Selective Enforcement, Power, and the Repair of Governance

• In Event: Sociology of Law Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Sociology of Law Section Roundtables: Table 5 — Courts, Credibility, and Legal Decision-Making

Abstract

This paper argues that selective enforcement is not a deviation from legality, but a structured mode of informal governance through which power relations are managed under conditions of legal overload and political constraint. Where rules are expansive, demanding, and difficult to fully comply with, enforcement becomes a strategic resource: dense regulation makes violations ubiquitous and allows enforcement risk to be shifted onto weaker actors.

Building on this claim, the paper reconceptualizes patterns of selective rule enforcement as informal governance rather than regulatory failure. Adopting a sociological, field-oriented perspective, it examines how enforcement pressure and protection are unevenly distributed across actors. Rather than approaching selective enforcement in terms of the usual framings (discretion, prosecutorial judgment, limited resources, pragmatism, bias, corruption, or administrative incapacity), the analysis shows how expansive and ambiguous legal rules acquire strategic value precisely because they enable violations to be identified selectively, making exposure to sanction a function of position rather than compliance.

The argument draws on comparative empirical material from Russia and Ukraine, complemented by illustrative observations from other regulatory and organizational settings. Across these cases, selective enforcement stabilizes where legal demands exceed what can realistically be met, enabling some actors to remain protected while others absorb disproportionate regulatory risk. These patterns are durable and predictable, tracking organizational position, political embeddedness, and access to institutional protection.

At the same time, the paper shows that power-based instrumentalization alone does not explain the persistence of selective enforcement. Its endurance depends on routine forms of institutional repair carried out by regulators, street-level bureaucrats, and regulated actors themselves, who absorb and normalize underlying institutional contradictions through warnings, delays, informal tolerance, and pragmatic reinterpretation of rules. Repair renders governance workable without resolving the structural asymmetries embedded in enforcement regimes.

The paper contributes to the sociology of law by explaining why selective enforcement persists across settings and by cautioning that reforms focused solely on uniform rule application risk destabilization if they ignore the power relations and repair practices through which selective enforcement is sustained.

Author

• Michael Derrer, Lucerne University for Applied Sciences and Arts