Selective Enforcement as Governance: Protection, Exposure, and Institutional Workability

Regulatory systems across diverse political contexts routinely tolerate widespread rule violation without producing systemic breakdown, while attempts to intensify or equalise enforcement often generate dysfunction, resistance, or legitimacy crises. From the perspective of regulatory governance, this presents a central puzzle: if uniform rule enforcement is the normative benchmark of the rule of law, why do systems characterised by selective rule application frequently remain stable and predictable, and why do compliance-centred reforms so often undermine institutional performance? This paper addresses this puzzle by reconceptualising selective enforcement as a mode of governance rather than as a residual failure of regulation. It advances a field-analytical perspective that examines how protection and exposure to legal sanction are distributed across actors within regulatory regimes. Rather than treating bias, corruption, or weak implementation capacity as sufficient explanations in isolation, the analysis situates these factors within structured enforcement environments shaped by institutional constraints, political economy, and power relations. Drawing on empirical material from Russia and Ukraine, complemented by comparative illustrations from other regulatory and organisational contexts, the paper shows how enforcement asymmetries emerge as recurrent responses to regulatory overload, contradictory legal mandates, and limited state capacity. In such settings, policy implementation often becomes selective: some actors are systematically shielded from sanction, while others absorb disproportionate regulatory risk. These asymmetries are not accidental deviations from formal rules, but patterned features of governance systems operating under constraint. When other stabilising mechanisms—such as coherent regulation, administrative capacity, or political consensus—are weak or contradictory, enforcement asymmetry becomes a recurrent substitute for maintaining institutional operability. At the micro level, the paper analyses how these structural asymmetries are reproduced through routine forms of institutional maintenance. Officials, regulated actors, and intermediaries engage in ongoing repair work to reconcile formal rules with practical constraints, navigating tensions between legality, proportionality, and feasibility. Crucially, this repair work is not evenly available: access to discretion and flexibility is structured by actors’ positions within enforcement environments, making adaptation safer for protected actors and riskier for those more exposed to sanction. The paper contributes to regulatory governance scholarship by explaining why selective enforcement persists beyond narratives of administrative failure or corruption, clarifying why reforms premised on uniform enforcement often misfire, and linking macro-level enforcement structures to lived governance experience. It concludes by discussing implications for regulatory reform, cautioning that interventions which ignore the governance role of enforcement asymmetry risk destabilising institutions without strengthening the rule of law.