Rules as policy data? Measuring and linking policy substance and legislative context

IF 3.2 2区社会学 Q1 LAW

Regulation & Governance Pub Date : 2023-05-10 DOI:10.1111/rego.12528

Steffen Hurka, Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

There is growing scholarly interest in analyzing changes in policies, laws, and regulations. Some concepts depart from the goal of identifying changes in policy substance. Other contributions have concentrated on the structural characteristics of laws and regulations containing these substantive changes. Extracting measures of policy substance from legislative texts is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor as it requires the manual assessment and coding of legal acts. The assessment of the structural characteristics of laws and regulations, by contrast, can be done applying automated natural language processing. An important critical question is, thus, whether we can combine these approaches and simplify the information extraction by inferring changes in the policy substance from the legislative context in which these changes are embedded. Examining more than 100 legal acts in the area of EU environmental and climate policy, we find that the measures capturing policy substance and the structural characteristics of legal acts context are not systematically linked. In other words: changes in the structural features of legal acts cannot be used as an approximation for changes in policy substance. We conclude by sketching out a research agenda when (and when not) to use the different concepts and related measurements.

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规则作为策略数据?衡量和联系政策实质和立法背景

学者们对分析政策、法律和法规的变化越来越感兴趣。有些概念偏离了确定政策实质变化的目标。其他贡献集中于载有这些实质性变化的法律和条例的结构特点。从立法文本中提取政策实质措施是一项具有挑战性和耗时的工作，因为它需要对法律行为进行人工评估和编码。相比之下，法律和法规的结构特征的评估可以通过自动的自然语言处理来完成。因此，一个重要的关键问题是，我们是否可以结合这些方法，并通过从这些变化所包含的立法背景中推断政策实质的变化来简化信息提取。通过对欧盟环境和气候政策领域100多个法律行为的研究，我们发现，捕捉政策实质的措施与法律行为背景的结构特征并没有系统地联系起来。换句话说，法律行为结构特征的变化不能作为政策实质变化的近似值。最后，我们勾勒出一个研究议程，何时(何时不)使用不同的概念和相关的测量。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Regulation & Governance Multiple-

CiteScore

7.80

自引率

10.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Regulation & Governance serves as the leading platform for the study of regulation and governance by political scientists, lawyers, sociologists, historians, criminologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists and others. Research on regulation and governance, once fragmented across various disciplines and subject areas, has emerged at the cutting edge of paradigmatic change in the social sciences. Through the peer-reviewed journal Regulation & Governance, we seek to advance discussions between various disciplines about regulation and governance, promote the development of new theoretical and empirical understanding, and serve the growing needs of practitioners for a useful academic reference.