Voluntary compliance is widely treated as a higher quality, more sustainable form of cooperation between citizens and the state than compliance secured through monitoring, incentives, and sanctions. Yet it remains an unrealized ideal rather than an operational paradigm. This talk, drawing on the book of the same title (Cambridge University Press, 2025) (open access https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/can-the-public-be-trusted/B3E11831E3051D4E928B9252B6767A4B#fndtn-metrics) examines why governments struggle to know when voluntary compliance is occurring, and under what conditions regulatory interventions are likely to cultivate it rather than crowd it out.

The argument synthesizes regulation theory, behavioral ethics, behavioral public policy, and social cooperation research. Building on this synthesis, the talk advances a conceptual framework that situates the antecedents of effective voluntary compliance across four dimensions: individual, situational, regulatory, and cultural. It distinguishes voluntary compliance from neighboring constructs such as honesty, trustworthiness, cooperation, and intrinsic motivation, and proposes indicators for evaluating it, including durability, positive externalities, internalization, crowding out, and changes in trust and social capital.

The core complexity is twofold. First, regulators rarely have reliable means of gauging the extent and quality of public cooperation, a measurement gap that pushes them toward coercive instruments whose long-term effects on intrinsic motivation are often suboptimal. Second, the conditions under which voluntary compliance flourishes are highly context-dependent: distributive justice concerns, questions of governmental legitimacy, the role of technology in monitoring and prediction, and culturally specific dispositions all shape whether intrinsically motivated cooperation can take root.

The talk closes with observations from taxation, healthcare policy, and environmental regulation, contrasting motivational appeals grounded in legitimacy, morality, and reputational integrity. It asks whether firms can self-regulate, what level of voluntary compliance is required, and whether sustained cooperation can reshape culture over time. The aim is to help regulators navigate the trade-offs between coercive and cooperative policies, and to clarify when reliance on voluntary cooperation is normatively attractive and empirically realistic.