Trust-Based Regulation: a Conjoint Experiment on Regime Actors' Preferences

Trust-based regulation: a conjoint experiment on regime actors' preferences Koen Verhoest & other authors of the GOBAREG research team Trust-based regulation has gained prominence as an alternative to command-and-control approaches, promising greater flexibility, learning, and effectiveness in complex policy domains. Yet despite its normative appeal, we still know relatively little about the conditions under which trust-based regulatory arrangements are considered legitimate and desirable by the actors who jointly constitute regulatory regimes. This paper addresses this gap by examining how different regime actors evaluate key design features of goal-based regulation, and how these evaluations vary depending on their institutional role and sectoral context. We present findings from two large-scale conjoint experiments conducted among rule makers, enforcement agencies, regulatees, and interest group representatives in the care sector and the environmental sector. The experiments systematically vary core rule design features—discretion, clarity, and stringency—alongside stakeholder involvement (diversity and timing) and modes of enforcement (contextual versus uniform; coercive versus lenient). Respondents are asked to evaluate regulatory profiles in relation to their own core task, allowing us to assess not only average preferences but also role-specific trade-offs. The results show substantial heterogeneity in preferences across regime actor groups. While discretion is generally valued as a precondition for trust-based regulation, its perceived desirability depends strongly on accompanying features such as rule clarity and enforcement style. Enforcers and regulatees tend to favor contextual and lenient enforcement when discretion is high, whereas rule makers and interest groups are more likely to condition their support for discretion on higher levels of clarity and stakeholder involvement. Importantly, we find significant interaction effects between rule design features and both enforcement modes and participatory arrangements, suggesting that trust-based regulation is evaluated as a coherent package rather than as a set of isolated instruments. By unpacking actor-specific preferences and interaction effects, this paper contributes to debates on regulatory governance, trust, and regime complexity. It offers a more actor-centered understanding of when trust-based, goal-oriented regulation is likely to gain support across regulatory regimes and policy sectors.