Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview III. PA Reform Author(s) Bianca Radu Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca Romania Title Empirical Insight on the Implementation of the Law on the Transparency of the Decision-Making Process File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Bianca Radu Abstract The paper aims to analyze the challenges of the implementation of the law on transparency of the decision-making process since its adoption in 2003. The law requires all public institutions to announce the drafts of normative acts with 30 days in advance of their discussion in a decision forum and to allow citizens and civil society organizations to propose recommendations for amending the normative acts. The analysis will consist on analyzing the annual reports that all public institutions have to fill out at the end of each year; the reports will be analyzed for at least the past four years in order to identify a trend with regard to the implementation of law. In addition, interviews will be conducted with civil servants responsible with the implementation of the law in order to identify the main challenges in implementing the law, how many recommendations for amending policy proposals were received from citizens and civil society organizations, and which were the problems that generated the largest number of recommendations. The research will be conducted at national level on city halls of county residences and county councils. Additional information about the challenges of the implementation of the law will be collected from previous researches that were conducted by academics and nongovernmental organizations on this topic. The main topics that will be covered through the analysis will be: number of drafts of normative acts that have been announced publicly, total number of recommendations received for amending the drafts, total number of recommendations included in the drafts, number of recommendations that were included in the final versions of the normative acts, number of people that participated to local and county council meetings. The goal of the research is to identify whether the adoption of the law contributed towards increasing the citizens’ and nongovernmental organizations’ involvement in the decision making process.