Periodic Reporting for period 1 - REPGOV (Representative Government through Democratic Governance)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-01-01 bis 2023-06-30
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.