Mapping the Normative Principles of Public Administration across the Law

• In Event: Politics and Performance in the Federal Government

Abstract

The legal basis of public administration provides it with fundamental normative principles that guide its practice. These principles, such as impartiality or transparency, are the primary formal way of connecting the normative values of a state to the practice of its public administration. How do administrative principles shape the legal structure of public administration? We develop a novel method for quantitatively measuring the importance of principles such as impartiality or transparency to national laws and apply it in the case of Italy, which has a civil law system. Our analysis proceeds in the following stages. First, we use supervised machine learning to classify each section of a law according to the administrative principles it addresses. Second, to train our classifiers, we compare initial results with human coding of text of the laws and with the expert understandings of lawyers concerning the role of administrative principles in each law in the sample. Third, we use our trained models to classify the entire Italian legal code, which constitutes more than 73,000 legal documents adopted since 1948, and we divide these documents into sections. Fourth, we then construct network-analytic measures of centrality to determine the importance of administrative principles across all areas of Italian law. Fifth, because our unit of analysis is the section of a law, we then reconstruct the entire legal code to develop a portrait of the presence and importance of administrative principles throughout the national laws of the contemporary Italian state. Finally, because there are a specified number of administrative principles in Italian law, we employ discrete choice models to examine the influence of institutions as well as characteristics of the electoral and party system on the relative importance of administrative principles in the laws as they have been written and amended over time. Our explanatory factors capture changes in the electoral formula, regional devolution of powers, governing coalitions, the policy positions of government parties, as well as the harmonizing forces of European Union law. This paper is part of a larger project to map the importance of administrative principles in various European Union member states. Our method and results will provide a novel portrait of the administrative values that undergird public administration in contemporary Europe.

Authors

• Anthony Michael Bertelli, Pennsylvania State University

• Zsuzsanna Blanka Magyar, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals

• Marika Danielle Csapo, Utah State University