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The weak or selective enforcement of parchment rules is a widely recognized problem in Latin American and developing states. In Chapter 1, Brinks, Levitsky, and Murillo theorize institutional weakness as the gap between the way social interactions should be structured by institutions and the actual way social interactions occur. We define enforcement as the set of actions that the state takes to reduce the size of that gap. 1 Our point of departure is that enforcement is often uneven and therefore constitutes a key element of the politics of institutional weakness; when rules are enforced is equally, if not more, important than the content of the rules themselves. In this chapter, we build an account of the political and societal determinants of enforcement to elucidate why and how weak institutions gain relevance and how strong institutions might, or might not, emerge from state action. By far, dominant approaches to explaining the lack of enforcement in countries with weak institutions point to deficits in state capacity as the key explanatory factor. Strong states have the necessary financial and human resources to pursue their policies, are less prone to corruption or illegal conduct, and have extensive reach in their territory to make laws effective. Many authors have pointed out how Latin American states cannot enforce their laws due to state weakness (O’Donnell 1993; Grindle 2009). The positive relation between state capacity and enforcement leads some authors to regard bureaucratic and state reforms as the cornerstone for building up strong institutions (Echebarría and Cortázar 2006; Rose-Ackerman 2007). Although state capacity is certainly quite …