This project was supported by the European Commission under the Marie Curie Integration Grant (FP7-MC-CIG 334008). It was conducted between March 2013-March 2016 at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. The project aims to assess the extent of convergence among European Union (EU) and OECD member states on the way executives make regulations.
Transparency, openness, accountability, and the use of scientific evidence are values now common in rulemaking process of many countries. Although theoretical and empirical efforts to frame and probe the Americanisation of administrative law and regulatory governance, a metrical measure for assessing the extent of convergence is still lacking. This research project fills this gap, by assessing the extent of converge among OECD and EU member states.
This research aims to assess the explanatory power of the underlying causes of Americanisation against the emergence of a European Administrative space via harmonisation, the transnational communication facilitated by the OECD, as well as globalising economic and political structures. The proposed research attempts to make important contributions to the literature of political science and comparative administrative law. It clarifies the concept of rulemaking, traces the sequence of adoption as well as the cross-national patterns of administrative requirements, and assesses and estimates the extent of rulemaking process convergence.
By relying on properly construed competing explanatory frameworks, the research makes the following three contributions to the literature of political science and comparative administrative law. The first contribution concerns the concept formation of administrative rulemaking. The emergence and the evolution of regulatory governance are taken into account, in order to trace cross-national patterns of regulatory innovation adoption. The second contribution refers to the literature of ‘global administrative law’, by assessing and estimating the extent of rulemaking process convergence. The final contribution is to the methodological literature on policy convergence. By relying on the available approaches to assess policy convergence, this research project gauge the quality of empirical findings stemming from different methods.
De Francesco, F. and G. Castro (2016) “Beyond Legal Transposition: Regulatory Agencies and de facto Convergence of the EU rail liberalisation”, European Journal of Public Policy. DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2016.1254272.
Bach, T., F. De Francesco, M. Maggetti, and E. Ruffing (2016) “Transnational Bureaucratic Politics: An Institutional Rivalry Perspective on EU Network Governance”, Public Administration, 94:1, 9–24.
De Francesco, F. (2016) “Transfer Agencies, Regulatory Quality Indices, and the Media: Comparing the World Bank and the OECD”, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, 18:4, 350-365.