Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PROTEGO (Procedural Tools for Effective Governance (PROTEGO) Patterns, Outcomes and Policy DesignProcedural Tools for Effective Growth: Patterns, Outcomes and policy Design)

Teaser

Contemporary European societies struggle with two problems: how to make the bureaucracies accountable and how to make the bureaucracy effective in generating an attractive business environment, hindering corruption and contributing to trust in government. PROTEGO contributes...

Summary

Contemporary European societies struggle with two problems: how to make the bureaucracies accountable and how to make the bureaucracy effective in generating an attractive business environment, hindering corruption and contributing to trust in government.

PROTEGO contributes to the identification of a range of solutions to these problems with a fundamental claim: combinations of procedural regulatory instruments have causal effects on the performance of political systems, specifically on trust in government, control of corruption, sustainability and the quality of the business environment. The key mechanism in this causal relation is accountability to different types of stakeholders. PROTEGO provides a theoretical rationale to capture the accountability effects by adopting an extension of delegation theory that considers multiple stakeholders. The overall objective of our theoretical framework is to test its observable implications on outcomes such as ease of business, corruption in the public sector, and trust in government. Empirically, this research programme collects, validates and analyses original data across the EU and its 28 Member States for the period 2000-¬2015, distinguishing between central departmental activity (which is the main focus of our analysis) and independent regulatory agencies.

The new dataset maps in detail the design of the following administrative procedures:

_Notice and Comment
_Freedom of Information
_Impact Assessment of proposed legislation and regulation
_Ombudsman
_Administrative judicial review

These are all procedures that affect rule-making and they are analysed along with more general principles of transparency and fairness that apply to administrative action. PROTEGO is a project on design, not implementation, hence we are explaining how accountability and its outcomes emerge from different designs of the ecology of administrative procedures.

The second overall objective is to show how the instruments work together, as combinations or ecologies that produce effects on the outcome described above exactly because they work together and together trigger the mechanisms that cause the outcome. It is the overall ecology or mix of instruments that produces causal effects. To capture this type of causality, we will draw on a suitable methodological approach – the theory of sets – to find out how different combinations of instruments generate mechanisms that produce the final outcomes. In the social sciences, the theory of sets is better known as QCA – qualitative comparative analysis: this is our third overall (methodological) objective.

The final objective is to generate a set of empirical demonstrations of how accountability produces outcomes that will assist in the design of regulatory reform across the EU member states. These empirical results will be corroborated by the presence of a rigorous novel dataset that will sit alongside other indicators of regulatory quality produced by the OECD and the World Bank. Its analyses will contribute to our understanding of the political economy of growth and will inform policy-¬makers and international organisations about the effects of different regulatory designs. PROTEGO will generate briefing sessions for policy-¬makers, contributions to scientific conferences and professional associations, scientific publications and blog posts.

Work performed

During the first two years of the project, our first and main practical objective in terms of research has been to identify a suitable measurement approach and instrument to carry out the empirical activities of the project. The project was in fact approved with considerable degrees of freedom as far as the transition from concept formation to measurement is concerned. After having piloted different options for the concepts-to-measures transition, we found an approach that allows to consider all the policy instruments covered by our project with a single measurement template. This approach draws on the institutional grammar tool (IGT) of Elinor Ostrom and her co-authors, specifically the categorisation of rule types within the grammar of institutions. We created different pilots of how Ostrom\'s approach could be transformed into a single measurement template. Having reached a satisfactory level with the precision of the measurement in the pilot cases, we then moved on to the design of our own novel protocol for data collection and rule extraction from the relevant legal texts. The same protocol applies to all the five pure administrative procedures (Notice and Comment -often known as consultation in the EU member states; Freedom of Information; Impact Assessment of proposed legislation and regulation; Ombudsman; administrative judicial review) and countries/polities covered by the project. The protocol is made up of four tasks. Task 1 involves the detection of the relevant legal bases of the procedure of interest in the studied country. Task 2, the most important one for the sake of the collection of raw data points, requires the data collector (a native or proficient speaker with a degree in administrative law or related fields) to extract rules (i.e.: specific articles in original language and English translation) from the legal bases according to seven rule typologies. Individual and group training and guidance have been provided to the contracted experts as to implement the instructions regarding the identification of rules (see also below). Task 3 requires the expert to draft a flowchart that captures the procedural dimension and visually systematize the rule extracted in task 2. Finally, in Task 4 a number of open-ended questions are asked, serving as further contextualization of the extracted rules and working as control of the measurement’s validity.

These protocols capture theoretically robust, systematic and comparable data points in form of portions of legal provisions. They extend Ostrom\'s IGT approach to the specific features of the regulatory policy instrumentation as well as capturing of the overall rule configuration of the procedure within the administrative law context. This is the first time the analysis of rules (inspired by the institutional grammar tool) is applied on a large comparative scale to 28 countries (plus the EU). Previous applications of Ostrom\'s rules typology have covered micro-applications for example cases of water irrigation in areas of a country or portion of a single anti-tobacco law in a country.

After having launched a competitive bid to work as expert data collectors, we hired (as sub-contractors) and trained 38 administrative lawyers or graduates in related field with proven expertise in the respective areas of administrative law in the EU 28 countries. The actual data collection was carried out hence by a team of 38 lawyers and scholars selected on the basis of their specific and verified competence with administrative law and in particular rule-making procedures in individual member states or families of countries. Along with the 145 (29x5) core protocols that we commissioned for the individual country procedures, we have also commissioned one background protocol per country (based on open-ended questions) covering general and constitutional principles of administrative action and transparency bringing the number of sub-contracted protocols to a total of 174. The experts wer

Final results

We expect PROTEGO to make progress beyond the state of the art in the following directions: the creation of a new unique dataset of fundamental administrative procedures across the EU, the empirical analysis of combinations of regulatory policy instruments and their effects on outcomes like ease of business, bureaucratic corruption and trust in government, the formulation of new suggestions for the design of regulatory instrumentation and administrative procedures in general. Design is prominent in our project, especially at the end of the project. Today the suggestions for design of regulatory procedures such as consultation of stakeholders or impact assessment of new legislation are not sensitive to the nuances of context. Our project will demonstrate that a certain combination of regulatory policy instruments improves on ease of business in certain member states of the EU, but other member states obtain the same result by drawing on a different constellation of instruments that in the end triggers the same mechanisms conducive to the quality of the business environment. Further, let us consider together ease of business, control of corruption, and trust in government: together these are three powerful levers to produce growth. There is a lively debate on how to relaunch growth in the EU in its member states. PROTEGO will generate a new way of thinking on growth, re-focusing political attention on the link between regulation, innovation and growth, which is also prominent in some recent work in the Council and at the Commission.

At the end of the project, we will also will demonstrate how political scientists can work with a large team of lawyers (38) in genuine inter-disciplinary fashion and generate results together. In this aim lies also an important element of political scientists training lawyers on measurement, as well as lawyers informing our categories and concept formation.

Scientifically, our contribution is interdisciplinary and at the frontier of research. We are the first team to examine very different regulatory procedures that affect rule-making with a single empirical measurement template. This template is not ad hoc. It is not based on surveys and self-diagnosis by government officers. Instead, it is anchored to a robust theoretical framework, that is, Ostrom\'s analysis of rules within the grammar of institutions. This has led us to the extraction of theoretically robust data points in the form of selected articles, clauses and portions of in force legalisation (in original language and English). As such, the data collectd via our methodology are fully replicable and will be made publicly available to encourage and foster further comparative analysis of the design of procedures across the EU and the effects of different designs.