III. Working Group on Strategic Leadership in Central Government

About the Working Group

Background

The quality of government regulation has attracted increasing interest among both practitioners and academics (OECD 1995, 1997, 2002; Nicolletti & Pryor 2001; Baldwin & Cave 1999, Baldwin et al. 2000). The OECD and World Bank have paid particular attention to problems of regulatory quality and identified the reform of law-making institutions as one of their main policy objectives. The EU has also encouraged its member states to address domestic regulatory problems so as to enhance the European economy’s ability to generate growth and innovation.

Practitioners of public administration and legal reform are likely to agree quickly on a basic set of normative policy prescriptions and on the models of best regulatory practice to be emulated in Central and Eastern Europe. But much less is known about how the configuration of the executive influences requlatory quality. The Ljubljana workshop will focus on this topic, thereby seeking to enhance the knowledge about the institutional determinants of regulatory quality. Legislation and regulation are seen as key fields allowing us to evaluate the ‘strategic’ orientation of executive governance. That is, they provide a functional and policy perspective to assess whether institutional reforms of or within the executive (such as a strengthening of strategic planning units) make a difference for policies.

Frequent changes of government are the consequence, which can be illustrated by the fact that in none of the 15 East-central and Southeast European countries has a single cabinet – conceived as a team of one prime minister and a distinct coalition of parties – survived the period between January 2003 and July 2005. Despite these inauspicious structural and political conditions, some executives have been more successful than others in improving legislative and regulatory quality. The aim of the workshop is to identify how these executives have managed to build strategic capacity and improve their regulatory performance.

In the 2005 meeting of the working group, participants generally agreed that regulatory quality is a function of executive capacity. This capacity can be strengthened by streamlining decision procedures, developing the government or prime minister’s office and reinforcing incentives for collective or centralized decision making.

The Ljubljana workshop will draw on these findings and is intended to develop more precise notions of the causal relations between our independent and dependent variables as well as a more contextualized understanding of specific executive changes and their effects.

The key working hypothesis is that the extent to which governments produce high quality regulations is causally related to the position of the centre of government within the intra-executive law-making process. ‘High quality regulations’ are defined as regulations that are integrative and welfare-maximizing; that are knowledge-based and consider policy externalities and interdependencies; and that are informed by a longer-term perspective going beyond immediate re-election concerns. ‘Centre of government’ comprises the administrative bodies assisting the prime minister, his or her deputies and / or the cabinet as a whole in decision making and policy coordination.

The hypothesis assumes that centres of government have strong incentives to steer ministerial departments towards the adoption of strategic, welfare-maximizing and integrative regulations. Conversely, weak centres diminish the capacity of central governments to adopt and implement high quality regulations. This is because, under weak central coordination and control, ministers and their staff have incentives to ‘go it alone’ or pursue narrow departmental interests at the expense of the strategic interests of the cabinet.

To analyze centres of government and executives, papers should study the executive law-making process in detail, with a focus on the relations between line ministries and centres of government. The analysis should not only describe the legal framework and institutional arrangement but also seek to probe into the practice of law-making.

To analyze the quality of regulations, we invite papers that investigate qualitative or quantitative indicators. Prospective authors are recommended to build on extensive previous research on measurement of regulatory quality (see for example http://www.brad.ac.uk/irq). The indicators could include:

-rates of amendment as measurement of regulatory stability;

- quality of impact assessment data as measurement of regulatory efficiency;

Country case studies are as welcome as comparative studies. Paper authors may work with qualitative and/or quantitative methodologies. The workshop will focus on Central and Eastern Europe and will cover both the new EU member states and other countries of the region. Its ambition is to study the configuration of centres of government and their impact on regulatory outcomes both across countries and across time.