Little is known about the responsiveness of Chinese government organizations to public participation in the policymaking process. In this article, we examine government responsiveness in the notice and comment process, in which organizations make public draft laws and regulations and solicit feedback on these proposals. We create and analyze a data set containing information drawn from more than one thousand instances of notice and comment policymaking carried out between 2004 and 2020 by government organizations at the central, provincial, and municipal levels. We find—consistent with expectations—that subnational governments were more responsive to public comments than central government ministries and that organizations were particularly responsive to lengthier comments and comments expressing negative sentiments. Although these patterns suggest the potential of the notice and comment process to mitigate information deficits and improve decision making, it nevertheless remains possible that government responses are merely window dressing and are not accompanied by substantive policy changes.

Consultation is a crucial tool for better regulation, as well as being essential for the accountability and legitimacy of decision-makers. The European minimum requirements for consultation are funda- mental conditions in order to attain these goals. However, they may still not be enough, and consul- tation should also be designed to neutralize or bring out cognitive limitations, both of decision- makers as well as of stakeholders. This paper claims that enriching the better regulation approach with cognitive insights can in fact increase consultation effectiveness and thus become a piece of the puzzle in improving the legitimacy of the European Commission. Moreover, it suggests some techniques to tackle this complexity, which need to be further assessed by ad hoc experiments.

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.

The government has published a revised set of government consultation principles. These principles give clear guidance to government departments on conducting consultations. We have amended the principles in the light of comments from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and to demonstrate the government’s desire to engage more effectively with the public.
We will use more digital methods to consult with a wider group of people at an earlier stage in the policy-forming process. We will make it easier for the public to contribute their views, and we will try harder to use clear language and plain English in consultation documents.
We will also reduce the risk of ‘consultation fatigue’ by making sure we consult only on issues that are genuinely undecided.

The draft OECD Best Practice Principles for Regulatory Policy: Reviewing the Stock of Regulation [the Principles] is hereby presented for public consultation.

The aim of the Principles is to provide policymakers and civil servants in both OECD member and partner countries with a practical instrument to better design and operationalise their ex post evaluation systems. The objective is to complement the 2012 Recommendation on Regulatory Policy and Governance which, albeit clear on the importance of undertaking evaluations in the overall context of the regulatory lifecycle, is rather general on providing specific guidance.
In these Principles, particular attention is paid to ensuring that regulation is comprehensively reviewed over time, and that the reviews include an assessment of the actual outcomes achieved against their rationales and objectives. The Principles further expand on these areas by covering both the overall governance of ex post evaluation systems and individual reviews, various methodologies that can be used as assessment tools, public consultation throughout the review process, as well as capacity building and leadership.