Representative Government through Democratic Governance

Project Information

REPGOV

Grant agreement ID: 101020966

DOI

10.3030/101020966

EC signature date 20 September 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 477 902,50

EU contribution

€ 2 477 902,50

Coordinated by

INSTITUT BARCELONA D ESTUDIS INTERNACIONALS, FUNDACIO PRIVADA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - REPGOV (Representative Government through Democratic Governance)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

REPGOV is a pioneering project that links administrative policymaking to representative government in a new way. At its heart is a simple idea, but a democratic dilemma: the discretion that modern governments give to administrative officials not only captures the means for implementing policies, but also democratic values and the authority to make tradeoffs among them. How does the structure of public administration influence these value tradeoffs? What are the implications of this as the structures in use have become more complex? There have been many attempts to address these questions, but none at this scale,and what distinguishes REPGOV from extant literatures is its overarching research question: How does the structure and organization of public administration shape the democratic belief systems of officials? The traditional legitimating narrative of public administration confines democratic values to the relationship between political representatives and public managers. REPGOV turns this narrative on its head by arguing and illustrating how public managers have the discretionary authority to make decisions that define—or redefine—the nature of democracy for the governments and citizens they serve. It examines how changing or adding structures of governance, as when performance targets or citizen participation are included in administrative decision making, can strengthen, or weaken, the values of a representative democracy. While institutions matter, the behavior of public administrators matters, too. Their democratic belief systems may well be shaped by the value tradeoffs implicit in the structure of their offices, but their beliefs can also diverge from those incentivized by their organizations, and, consequently, have an independent influence on democracy. This argument yields a value reinforcement hypothesis—democratic values in the structure and practice of public administration reflect the democratic values of a political system—that lies at the core of REPGOV. Does public administration reinforce the values of representative government? Why and how? REPGOV’s mixed-methods empirical strategy qualitatively explores the mechanisms of value reinforcement in various administrative settings in contemporary Europe, employs machine learning techniques to explore the syntax of value reinforcement in laws and regulations, and experimentally examines structured choices about reinforcing values. REPGOV aims to illustrate how the democratic value trade-offs made by public administrators are an important missing link in contemporary discussions about the quality, and the nature, of representative government.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the REPGOV proposal, the first year was designed to focus on theory building, but we have accomplished considerably more in our scientific program. The normative theory component of the first subproject (SP1) as envisioned in the proposal was completed with the publication of a short book, Public Administration and Democracy: The Complementarity Principle (Cambridge University Press, 2023). SP1 has a behavioral theory component that has been initially offered in a paper now under revision entitled “Understanding the Democratic Character of Public Encounters”. The institutional component of SP1 is offered in a paper entitled “Administrative Law as a Network of Principles,” which will be presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 2, 2023 and the European Group for Public Administration, September 6, 2023. Some initial results were presented in an invited talk at the Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, June 27, 2023. Our network and quantitative text analysis of the formal (legal) normative environment of public administration has been tied to data collection for SP3. Consequently, this subproject is moving faster than expected. The aforementioned paper examines our argument in the entire corpus of Italian law since 1948. We have also begun the collection of a similarly large corpus of Spanish statutory law. An important theoretical question regarding the importance of democratic values in the absence of governments was raised during the theory-building process of SP1. We have addressed this question in two ways. First, we have studied the policy content and partisan voting patterns of all legislation during caretaker government periods in Spain. The result will be presented in a paper “Caretaker Governments, Public Policy, and Public Administration” at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 2, 2023 and the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties Annual Conference, September 8-9, 2023). Second, we have conducted archival research into the creation of public administration institutions by the Allied Military Government in Trieste, Italy in 1945-46 and are currently analyzing the documents collected. We submitted our application for ethical review of the qualitative research in SP3 to the Institutional Review Board (CIREP) at Pompeu Fabra University on 21 June 2023. The qualitative work proposed in SP2 in the Italian Ministry of Culture is set to begin upon approval of our application. We are also building agreements with similar cultural heritage agencies in the UK and Belgium and expect to begin interviews in those countries later this year.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

By adopting a mixed-methods design, REPGOV bridges institutional and behavioral research in public administration through an interest in belief systems and in the use of network analysis. The past year has given us clear — and clearly novel approaches — to addressing these questions.
We have developed a method of connecting institutions, particularly the norms found in the law, with the beliefs and behaviors of public officials. The legal basis of public administration provides it with fundamental normative principles that guide its practice. These principles are the primary formal way of connecting the democratic values of a state to the practice of its public administration. REPGOV now makes use of these administrative principles with network analysis and state-of-the-art Bayesian statistical modeling. We reconstruct the normative framework in which public officials operate and where value tradeoffs arise. By developing a novel method for quantitatively measuring the importance of Italian administrative principles to national laws, REPGOV explores how administrative principles shape the legal structure of public administration. The constraints derived from public officials’ contracted role as citizens endowed with a public mandate are at the core of the REPGOV project. Legal and organizational rules delimit the set of behaviors in which a responsible public official can engage. They impose public conceptions of democratic values that remain in the background when public officials are called upon to exercise their discretion to resolve value tradeoffs. To be democratically responsible, public officials must reinforce the administrative value ordering of their systems without acting outside their legal authority or capacity to act.
This has given rise to a clear empirical agenda through the rest of the project.

REPGOV website