Understanding Regulators’ Preferences for Goal-Based Regulation: Individual, Organisational, and Sectoral Determinants.

In response to complex societal challenges such as demographic change, climate pressures, and emerging technologies like AI, governments are shifting from prescriptive, rule-based regulation toward adaptive, goal-based approaches. Understanding the shift toward this new tool in regulation requires attention not only to institutional design but also to the internal attitudes and capacities of those implementing policy: regulators in public agencies. As frontline actors in supervision and enforcement, regulators’ preferences and professional judgments critically shape the success of adaptive regulatory strategies. This study examines which individual, organisational, and sectoral factors are most strongly associated with regulators' support for open-ended regulation? Regulators are institutionally responsible for two related but distinct decisions: the degree of discretion versus clarity granted to regulatees through rule design, and the degree of latitude exercised in their own enforcement (context-bound versus uniform). We examine preferences for each separately. Using survey data from 56 regulators across four subsectors of Flemish welfare regulation, we estimate hierarchical OLS regression models with robustness checks including bootstrap confidence intervals, cross-validation, and elastic net regularisation. Organisational cooperation and capacity emerge as the strongest and most consistent predictors of preference for regulatee discretion, though capacity's effect runs counter to expectations. Higher-capacity organisations show lower support for discretion. Preference for context-bound enforcement, by contrast, remains largely unexplained by the factors examined. These findings suggest that openness to open-ended regulation is shaped more by organisational context than by individual disposition, and that regulation-design preferences and enforcement-approach preferences reflect substantively different underlying mechanisms, with implications for how regulatory reform is sequenced and supported in practice.