Publications

This study focuses on presenting the technological, impact and regulatory state of play in the EU, as compared to key competitor countries. This study also highlights industrial areas in which AI will bring significant socioeconomic benefits, before presenting a methodology for scrutinising the fitness of the EU policy and regulatory framework in the context of AI. This document was provided by the Policy Department for Economic, Scientific and Quality of Life Policies at the request of the committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE committee).

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform how government agencies do their work. Rapid developments in AI have the potential to reduce the cost of core governance functions, improve the quality of decisions, and unleash the power of administrative data, thereby making government performance more efficient and effective. Agencies that use AI to realize these gains will also confront important questions about the proper design of algorithms and user interfaces, the respective scope of human and machine decision-making, the boundaries between public actions and private contracting, their own capacity to learn over time using AI, and whether the use of AI is even permitted. These are important issues for public debate and academic inquiry. Yet little is known about how agencies are currently using AI systems beyond a few headline-grabbing examples or surface-level descriptions. Moreover, even amidst growing public and scholarly discussion about how society might regulate government use of AI, little attention has been devoted to how agencies acquire such tools in the first place or oversee their use. In an effort to fill these gaps, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) commissioned this report from researchers at Stanford University and New York University. The research team included a diverse set of lawyers, law students, computer scientists, and social scientists with the capacity to analyze these cutting-edge issues from technical, legal, and policy angles. The resulting report offers three cuts at federal agency use of AI: (i) a rigorous canvass of AI use at the 142 most significant federal departments, agencies, and sub-agencies (Part I) (ii) a series of in-depth but accessible case studies of specific AI applications at eight leading agencies (SEC, CPB, SSA, USPTO, FDA, FCC, CFPB, USPS) covering a range of governance tasks (Part II); and (iii) a set of cross-cutting analyses of the institutional, legal, and policy challenges raised by agency use of AI (Part III).

Ex-ante impact assessment and ex-post evaluation are regulatory policy tools that help inform the policy-making process with evidence-based analysis. Both tools are geared towards raising the quality of policies and legislation. While Better Regulation is widely deemed a prerogative of the executive branch, increasingly, parliaments are also emerging as actors. This study sheds light on the parliamentary dimension of Better Regulation. Based on a survey, it maps the capacities and experiences of the national parliaments of all 27 European Union (EU) Member States and of 11 further Council of Europe countries in the field of ex-ante impact assessment and ex-post evaluation. The study reveals that roughly half of the surveyed parliaments engage in regulatory policy beyond classical parliamentary scrutiny mechanisms. Overall, these parliaments show a very diverse pattern in terms of drivers, types and depth of engagement. There is no 'one size fits all' approach.

Our aim is to provide an overview of the debate on the Better Regulation (BR) Agenda presentedin 2015 by the European Commission. In addition to academic literature, we also consider studiesand reports from Think Tanks, international organizations, and EU internal scrutinizing bodies.After presenting the main aspects of the debate on some overarching elements of the BR Agenda,we focus in particular on two highlights: evidence-based policymaking and the integrated policycycle. We structure the discussion around main achievements, remaining critical aspects and sug-gestions about what could be further improved. Findings show that although the Commission re-mains a front-runner when it comes to Better Regulation, more efforts are needed to go the lastmile when it comes to evidence-based policymaking and closing the policy cycle. We find thatthe great majority of arrticles welcome the ambition of th e BR Agenda reform. At the same time,they also make clear that to effectively improve regulation, further methodological guidance andconcrete efforts in implementation are needed. Another interesting finding is that the debate onthe BR Agenda is extremely varied, covering normative as well as very technical aspects. It ap-pears, though, to be confined within certain academic fields (namely political science, public ad-ministration, and law), while other fields that can be, in practice, also deeply linked to BRrelated activities are less represented

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

As algorithmic systems become more critical to decision making across many parts of society, there is increasing interest in how they can be scrutinised and assessed for societal impact, and regulatory and normative compliance. This report is primarily aimed at policymakers, to inform more accurate and focused policy conversations. It may also be helpful to anyone who creates, commissions or interacts with an algorithmic system and wants to know what methods or approaches exist to assess and evaluate that system.

Behavioural Insights Teams (BITs) have gained prominence in government as policy advisors and are increasingly linked to the way policy instruments are designed. Despite the rise of BITs as unique knowledge brokers mediating the use of behavioral insights for policymaking, they remain underexplored in the growing literature on policy advice and advisory systems. The article emphasizes that the visible impact that BITs have on the content of policy instruments, the level of political support they garner and their structural diversity in different political departments, all set them apart from typical policy brokers in policy advisory systems connecting the science–policy divide.