PROTEGO - Procedural Tools for Effective Governance

Governments have adopted a range of administrative procedures, policy instruments and special bodies to open up the processes through which new laws and regulations are made, delivered and evaluated. In Protego we consider consultation, freedom of information acts, impact assessment of proposed laws and regulations, the Ombudsman, administrative judicial review and general principles of transparency and access to regulation usually contained in administrative procedure acts. We cover the EU-28 plus the EU as a separate case. We look at the design of instruments, procedures and institutions and we ask: how do these innovations work together? Specifically, one important research question that we address in Protego is about the effects of these combinations of instruments and procedures that we find in each country on outcomes that are fundamental to the quality of governance. To illustrate, what difference does a given combination make to corruption and to the quality of the business environment? To explore that, we draw on a suitable causal modeling of the relationships between the combinations and the outcomes. A fundamental characteristic of our approach, in fact, is not to measure the single average effect of one instrument at a time on the governance outcome we are interested, but the overall relationship between the ecology and the outcome. These considerations lead us to consider set-theoretic methods as the main conceptual and empirical framework for the project. 

Protego is designed to provide high levels of interdisciplinary research, including political science, public policy, political economy and law. Our extended team is made of a core group of researchers, an International Advisory Team and 40 national consultants.