Rules without regulation and regulation without rules

Abstract

In everyday discourse, and also in the academic literature, the expressions “regulatory interventions” (i.e. interventions intended to regulate behaviours) and “normative interventions” (i.e. interventions which set norms/rules) are usually assumed to be synonymous. From this perspective, any regulatory intervention is also normative, and vice versa. This article investigates the relationship between regulation and rules/norms in order to verify whether the “regulatory” and the “normative” aspects are intrinsically and essentially connected, as is usually thought (on the assumption that there is no regulation without rules and no rules without regulation).