Publications

Consultations are key to gather evidence that informs rulemaking. When analysing the feedback received, it is essential for the regulator to appropriately cluster stakeholders’ opinions, as misclustering may alter the representativeness of the positions, making some of them appear majoritarian when they might not be. The European Commission (EC)’s approach to clustering opinions in consultations lacks a standardized methodology, leading to reduced procedural transparency, while making use of computational tools only sporadically. This paper explores how natural language processing (NLP) technologies may enhance the way opinion clustering is currently conducted by the EC. We examine 830 responses to three legislative proposals (the Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act) using both a lexical and semantic approach. We find that some groups (like small and medium companies) have low similarity across all datasets and methodologies despite being clustered in one opinion group by the EC. The same happens for citizens and consumer associations for the consultation run over the DSA. These results suggest that computational tools actually help reduce misclustering of stakeholders’ opinions and consequently allow greater representativeness of the different positions expressed in consultations. They further suggest that the EC could identify a convergent methodology for all its consultations, where such tools are employed in a consistent and replicable rather than occasionally. Ideally, it should also explain when one methodology is preferred to another. This effort should find its way into the Better Regulation toolbox (EC 2023). Our analysis also paves the way for further research to reach a transparent and consistent methodology for group clustering.

In the era of digitalization, retail investors who buy/trade financial products through digital platforms often find themselves facing dark patterns, i.e. design models of online interfaces that exploit biases and emotions, leading them to make economic choices that are not always in their best interest. This contribution aims to explore the issue of dark patterns in the retail investment sector and the related regulatory outlooks. Therefore, it examines the perspectives that arise from the use of behavioral sciences and artificial intelligence to enhance the predominantly emerging command-and-control regulation in order to curb the phenomenon of dark pattern

Da tempo, le pubbliche amministrazioni fanno uso di tecnologie digitali, compresa l’intelligenza artificiale, nello svolgimento delle proprie funzioni. Tale fenomeno – unito all’impianto normativo di derivazione europea, volto a normare i processi di transizione digitale – impone un ripensamento dei principi e delle garanzie finora individuati dalla dottrina e dalla giurisprudenza e ispirati ai regimi giuridici tradizionali del diritto amministrativo. Il volume, muovendo dall’esame degli utilizzi attuali delle tecnologie digitali da parte dei pubblici poteri, ne ricostruisce le possibili nuove regole.

Abstract
Contemporary politics require a swift and responsive policy-making approach to respond to emergency situations quickly and to anticipate them in a strategic manner. Maintaining decision-making agility in times of urgency makes it necessary to think ahead of stress-impacting situations. To increase systemic resilience, policies must be designed in an adaptive way. Strategic options, futurity of policies and potential futures must be elaborated and kept in sight when developing policies. Anticipatory governance and strategic foresight activities are elements of such an adaptive governance mode. To transform decision-making in a future-oriented way, these forward-planning elements need to be institutionalised to support governance resilience. This article asks how anticipatory governance and strategic foresight are embedded within EU multilevel governance. It investigates the EU Better Regulation Agenda to understand how anticipatory governance already contributes to EU governance. Additionally, it discusses how the institutionalisation of strategic foresight can contribute to EU anticipatory governance.