Improving legal quality—a knowledge engineering approach

Many legislation drafting departments at the different ministries have their own quality insurance techniques. Furthermore in many cases the Ministry of Justice has a special role because it is usually responsible for the overall legal quality of a country. Despite all the effort that has been spent on improving legal quality using traditional measurements, such as co‐reading (peer reviewing etc.) many anomalies can still be found in recently drafted legislation. The situation is even worse in situations when existing legislation is adapted. This paper will show how a systematic approach that has its origins in knowledge engineering can help to improve legal quality. This approach was developed in the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA) (in Dutch: Belastingdienst) and offers both a method and supporting tools that support a systematic translation of (new) legislation into the administrations' processes. This method—called the POWER‐method—not only helps to improve the quality of (new) legislation. It also supports codification of the legal knowledge into procedures, computer programs and other designs. One of the advantages thereof is the reduction of the time‐to‐market of the implementation of legislation and its increased transparency (which will lead to reduced maintenance costs). Focus will be placed on legal quality improvement and knowledge representation techniques that are used to enable this will be explained. In contrast to other knowledge modeling approaches, the POWER‐approach is focused on modeling legal sources rather than expert knowledge. Expert knowledge of course is indispensable to find the correct interpretations and also for efficiency reasons. Starting with representing the (legal) experts' knowledge (using scenarios) helps to find the adequate scope (the legal sources to be analyzed). Confronting the expert with differences between the models built out of the experts' knowledge and the conceptual models constructed of the other knowledge sources (specifically the law) causes the legal experts to see things in a different light and has often led to changes in the law.     

Organized Grour>Government Relations in Norway: On the Structured Selection of Participants, Problems, Solutions, and Choice Opportunities *

This article reviews the nature of direct interest organizational participation in government in Norway. Organizational involvement, while high, varies markedly across different kinds of associations and issues. Activities are concentrated in the two organizational forms of the committee and remiss systems. The analysis of the linkage patterns with the ministries suggests that corporatism is a somewhat inadequate concept for describing the Norwegian system in general.     

THE FEDERAL PRINCIPLE AND NATIONAL PLANNING

I am pleased to be able to speak today to this conference of the Royal Institute of Public Administration. Your conference comes at a time of renewed interest in federalism. In the past year or so there has been an upsurge of new studies and assessments of federalism in the universities and in the press. New life has been breathed into a subject which for so long has seemed dead in spirit, if not in die flesh.     

Personalization in attributing responsibility for national problems to the president

The studies reported test two hypotheses concerning the conditions under which citizens will attribute more of the responsibility for political events to the president. The first hypothesis, derived from Heider's theory of defensive attribution, is that citizens who feel more threatened by national political problems will judge the president to be more responsible for those problems. The second hypothesis is that those who lack knowledge about political events will attribute more of the responsibility for such events to the president as a cognitive simplifying strategy. These hypotheses were tested in three studies—two surveys on inflation and unemployment and an experiment on nuclear war. The results of all three studies support Heider's defensive attribution hypothesis. Each suggests that those more threatened by a national political problem will hold the president more responsible for that problem. The survey results also suggest that such attributions of responsibility have an influence upon voting behavior, with those who hold the incumbent responsible for national economic problems more likely to vote for the other presidential candidates. The results of the three studies are equally clear in the case of knowledge effects. In none of the studies do those who lack political knowledge attribute increased responsibility for national problems to the president. In addition, there is no evidence of an interaction between threat and knowledge. Instead, threat-induced increases in attributions of responsibility to the president are found to occur to an equal degree at all levels of political knowledge.