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).

How will artificial intelligence (AI) transform government? Stemming from a major study commissioned by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), we highlight the promise and trajectory of algorithmic tools used by federal agencies to perform the work of governance. Moving past the abstract mappings of transparency measures and regulatory mechanisms that pervade the current algorithmic accountability literature, our analysis centers around a detailed technical account of a pair of current applications that exemplify AI’s move to the center of the redistributive and coercive power of the state: the Social Security Administration’s use of AI tools to adjudicate disability benefits cases and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of AI tools to target enforcement efforts under federal securities law. We argue that the next generation of work will need to push past a narrow focus on constitutional law and instead engage with the broader terrain of administrative law, which is far more likely to modulate use of algorithmic governance tools going forward. We demonstrate the shortcomings of conventional ex ante and ex post review under current administrative law doctrines and then consider how administrative law might adapt in response. Finally, we ask how to build a sensible accountability structure around public sector use of algorithmic governance tools while maintaining incentives and opportunities for salutary innovation. Reviewing and rejecting commonly offered solutions, we propose a novel approach to oversight centered on prospective benchmarking. By requiring agencies to reserve a random set of cases for manual decision making, benchmarking offers a concrete and accessible test of the validity and legality of machine outputs, enabling agencies

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).

Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens' Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues. This "deliberative wave" has been building since the 1980s, gaining momentum since around 2010. This report has gathered close to 300 representative deliberative practices to explore trends in such processes, identify different models, and analyse the trade-offs among different design choices as well as the benefits and limits of public deliberation. It includes Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes for Public Decision Making, based on comparative empirical evidence gathered by the OECD and in collaboration with leading practitioners from government, civil society, and academics. Finally, the report explores the reasons and routes for embedding deliberative activities into public institutions to give citizens a more permanent and meaningful role in shaping the policies affecting their lives.

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.

The European Commission has repeatedly emphasized that the results of ex post legislative (EPL) evaluations should be used to improve the quality of its legislative proposals. This article aims to explain the variation in such instrumental use of EPL evaluations by the Commission. Three high-quality EPL evaluations with varying levels of use were studied in-depth to assess the influence of political factors on evaluation use. The results show that, contrary to expectations, EPL evaluations may be used instrumentally even if their recommendations are opposed by important political actors in the legislative process. This article also shows that a lack of salience of the policy field to which an EPL evaluation belongs in the eyes of the Commission could, in combination with the institution's ambition to reduce its legislative output, be a sufficient condition for the non-use of that evaluation.

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

This article performs an ‘impact assessment’ of the EU Better Regulation Agenda. It considers whether there is a clear definition of the problems that the EU Better Regulation seeks to address, the evidence base, whether Better Regulation more effectively responds to those problems than alternative options, and what the costs, benefits and broader impacts of the the Agenda may be. The analysis suggests that while the Better Regulation Agenda generally promotes an open yet rational decision‐making process based on sound problem definitions and aiming at targeted solutions calibrated for optimum efficiency and effectiveness, some of its own problem assumptions remain unproven, it possesses contradictory traits and risks being counter productive. Furthermore, while EU Better Regulation may have benefits, it also entails significant costs that should not be overlooked. This assessment reveals the complex and multifaceted nature of EU Better Regulation, and the need to hold it to its own standards.

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.

Some argue that the global rise of behavioral approaches challenges the rationalist tradition in public policy. Others fear that it could undermine deliberation and public reasoning. This paper focuses on the worldwide rise and spread of behavioral expertise and behavioral public policy. It provides a general insight in terms of the role of expertise, the science-policy nexus and the distribution of epistemic competences in public policy. Based on an extensive literature review, the emergence and consequences of behavioral-expert networks are assessed. It will be suggested that it is necessary to break free from the microfocus proposed by behavioral public policy and to pay more attention to the institutional and cultural constellations of knowledge- and decision-making in democracies.

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.

One-stop shops have emerged as a way for governments to provide better services and improve regulatory delivery to citizens and business. The OECD Best Practice Principles for Regulatory Policy: One-Stop Shops for Citizens and Business offer a set of practical considerations for designing, operating, and reviewing one-stop shops. The Principles are based on a series of case studies and cover a wide range of tools and institutional arrangements to help governments improve their one-stop shops. This report is part of a series on “best practice principles” produced under the auspices of the OECD Regulatory Policy Committee. As with other reports in the series, it extends and elaborates on principles highlighted in the 2012 Recommendation of the Council on Regulatory Policy and Governance.

-Introduzione, di Federica Cacciatore e Nicoletta Rangone
-La nuova legislatura europea 2019-2024 e l’agenda della better regulation: le prime mosse, di Nadia Marin
-Capire la nostra natura politica nell’era della post-verità. Un report dell’Unione Europea, di Edoardo Guaschino
-L’intervento regolatorio dell’ART in materia di affidamenti dei servizi di trasporto pubblico locale su strada e per ferrovia: analisi ex ante o ex post dell’impatto?, di Miriam Giorgio
-L’Antitrust e la stima dell’impatto economico delle regolazioni anticoncorrenziali, di Gabriele Mazzantini
-Quando applicare l’AIR? Il caso delle Linee guida n. 15 dell’ANAC sul conflitto di interessi nei contratti pubblici, di Luca Caianiello
-Valorizzare la polivalenza dei dati personali per regolare i mercati digitali: note aggiuntive all’Indagine conoscitiva sui big data di AGCOM, AGCM e Garante privacy, di Matteo Falcone
-Recensione. Processo decisionale automatizzato e diritto amministrativo: quali implicazioni per il principio di trasparenza? La riflessione di Michèle Finck, di Ludovica Sacchi