Matias Dewey

By moving away from dualistic perspectives that see social order as the product of strong states but not weak states, this article develops a conceptual framework for interpreting hybrid social orders, i.e. those established by both legal and extra-legal actors. The initial premise is that hybrid forms of social domination resulting from the interaction between legal and extra-legal actors, and regulated by a combination of rational bureaucratic and neo-patrimonial rules, produce relevant economic and political outcomes such as job creation, the supply of basic services and the production of authority. Especially in contexts of continuous economic crisis, ethnic segregation, social marginalization and persistent inequality, these outcomes have ordering effects both in terms of reducing uncertainty and regulating social expectations. Furthermore, in such social contexts, socially tolerated illegal markets play a decisive role. Supported by recent and innovative research, this article concludes with hypotheses intended to promote further research.

Political economy scholarship generally assumes that governments are interested in enforcing economic regulations. Cases of non‐enforcement are predominantly studied in the context of developing countries and are chiefly associated with states' deficient institutional capacity. This article casts doubts on these assumptions by showing how governments in advanced democracies manipulate the regulatory regime and generate selective non‐enforcement of economic regulations to shape markets at their discretion. We argue that regulatory forbearance becomes an attractive form of industrial policy when governments are prevented from intervening discretionally in markets due to legal obstacles, which they cannot overcome; or when the productive structure of the country makes alternative forms of intervention unviable. Drawing on the study of tax non‐enforcement in two most‐different cases of strong and weak state capacity such as Germany and Italy, the article theorizes three techniques through which governments manipulate regulatory regimes: legal and organizational sabotage and shirking. By shedding light on the economic logic of forbearance, the article points at non‐enforcement as an overlooked mode of regulatory governance and suggests the need to inquire further into governments' strategic agency behind regulatory regimes.

The legal order is the legitimate foundation of liberal democracy. Its incomplete enforcement of the law can therefore appear dysfunctional, reflecting weak institutions, state capture, and corrupt practices. This paper casts doubt on such categorical assessments by systematically examining the reasons for and intentions behind incomplete enforcement. It argues that law enforcement is part of the political process that is deeply affected by the constellation of actors concerned. Choices over law enforcement produce social order that is analytically distinct from the production of legal norms and their formal implementation. By analyzing different types of partial enforcement, its rationales, and intended effects, we propose an approach that studies law enforcement as an integral part of public policy analysis and of the study of socioeconomic orders.

The obstacles to implementing labor standards in the garment industry have been addressed by a significant body of literature which increasingly considers local institutions. This includes viewing states and government actors as predictors of compliance. Yet fine-grained studies on how the interplay of informal institutions and local actors’ interests prevents standards being implemented are still lacking. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork at the main supply center for sweatshop produced and counterfeit clothing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this article shows how these actors’ tolerance toward the sweatshop economy obstructs the implementation of labor standards. According to empirical evidence, this tolerance means protecting certain actors, i.e. non-enforcing the law. Accordingly, the paper distinguishes between two types of protection: provided by state or by political actors. By uncovering the workings of informal institutions and the political actors’ logics, this article helps to understand why deplorable labor conditions in the garment industry persist.

This article contends that previous research has failed to consider resources that are systematically collected by way of informal taxation and channeled to support the provision of public services. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the markets for stolen auto parts and counterfeit clothing in Greater Buenos Aires, this article describes how state agencies informally tax these economies, and “follows the money” extracted. While a portion of these resources does end up in private pockets, the article shows that a greater share of the resources are directed toward enhancing state performance: welfare programs, everyday police duties, and political activities. An analysis of informal state financing schemes helps us to understand a state’s true capacities and its structural transformation over time.

This article focuses on the translation of the French and English law enforcement models into Argentina and analyzes its consequences in terms of social order. Whereas in the former two models the judiciary and police institutions originated in large-scale processes of historical consolidation, in the latter these institutions were implanted without the antecedents present in their countries of origin. The empirical references are Argentine police institutions, particularly the police of the Buenos Aires Province, observed at two moments in which the institutional import was particularly intense: towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, and at the end of the twentieth century. By way of tracing these processes of police constitution and reform, we show how new models of law enforcement and policing interacted with indigenous political structures and cultural frames, as well as how this constellation produced a social order in which legality and illegality are closely interwoven. The article is an attempt to go beyond the common observations regarding how an imported model failed; instead, it dissects the effects the translation actually produced and how the translated models transform into resources that reshape the new social order. A crucial element, the article shows, is that these resources can be instrumentalized according to »idiosyncrasies«, interests, and quotas of power.