Publications

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The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated ongoing developments in decision-making, which bring the notion of risk and the agencies responsible for its assessment and management at the forefront of the government agenda. The current centrality of risk regulation is dictated by the commitment by governments to achieve ambitious yet imperative sustainability objectives, and by the need to manage the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It lays against the overall debate about the role of science in informing policy decisions and the level of societal acceptance of risk and uncertainty. This chapter briefly takes stock of the fundamentals of risk regulation literature and proposes six topical themes that affect the future position of regulatory agencies – spanning from global crisis management to scientific integrity; from the regulation-innovation interface to enhancing government effectiveness through algorithmic regulation. The chapter then presents ideas on how to shape “Better Risk Regulation”, which will allow governments to adequately address the challenges and meet the opportunities of contemporary society.

Rulemaking in market regulation is accompanied by very strong procedural guarantees (such as motivation, participation and access) and is subject to better regulation tools, such as ex ante and ex post impact assessment and consultations. Starting from the empirical analysis of soft regulations by market regulators (the Anti-Corruption Authority, Bank of Italy, the Italian Companies and Exchange Commission, the Institute for the Supervision of Insurance, the Energy Market and Environment Authority, and the Authority for Communications Guarantees), this paper highlights their regulatory nature on some occasions. Moreover, it examines the perspectives and the criticalities stemming from the hypothetical application of better regulation tools to soft regulation.

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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.

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