lecture 2 Flashcards
Effectiveness of law
The effectiveness = the extent to which the aims of a law are realised
➞ many different factors impact whether new laws are effective
- Legislation which is aimed at codification (maintaining the status quo) or aimed at modification (to change something)
- Level of enforcement by special agencies (police, etc) or enforcement left to individuals
Factors influencing the effectiveness of new laws
- Legislation which is aimed at codification (maintaining the status quo) or aimed at modification (to change something)
- Level of enforcement by special agencies (police, etc) or enforcement left to individuals
How would you do research on the effectiveness of Covid regulations?
Discuss:
* What research questions would you ask?
* How would you measure effectiveness?
* How would you collect your data?
- What research question would you ask?: have the covid regulations effectively protected businesses in going bankrupt in Europe?
- How would you measure effectiveness? Compare the number of bankruptcies before, during, and after COVID-19 restrictions, and see how this has been protected covid regulations. Looking at buisfinesses that were on the verge of going bankrupt during covid, but didn’t due to the amazing regulations specifically. Compare high-risk sectors (e.g., hospitality, retail) with lower-risk sectors (e.g., tech, pharmaceuticals) to see if government support was effective across industries
- How would you collect your data? Looking at the data on subsidies, grants, and tax relief programs and their effect on unemployment data from labor offices.
Problems in assessing the effectiveness of legislation
- What were the intended effects?
- What are unintended and counterproductive effects?
- How can you measure the effects? Problems of causality: Are the effects caused by the new law?
Are changes in behaviour or attitude actually a result of legal change? - Time: Evaluations are a snapshot: Short term impact may not last; or it may take years for a law to
have effect
Measuring effectiveness: 1 - what is the aim of the law?
Must know what effect the legislator has intended
- Intended effects are not always clear
- Laws often have multiple/conflicting objectives
- Symbolic legislation
If you would have to do research on whether abortion laws are effective, that would be very hard. Because what exactly is the aim of the abortion laws..?
Measuring effectiveness: 2 - different kinds of effects
Unintended effects don’t always have to be negative btw, but there can often times be effects of regulations that weren’t meant or weren’t thought of when putting the law in tact
- Example: mandatory helmets for motorcyclists and moped riders
Measuring effectiveness: 3 - Causality problem
Effects are often hard to measure. To know if it actually is a result of legal change is often the question
Why does the fact that people comply with the law, not mean that the law is effective? - study question
This is a double causality problem
Law ➞ compliant behaviour ➞ objective
- The compliant behaviour doesn’t always have to be because of the law
- Being compliant doesn’t always mean that the law will be effective. People can be afraid and do things for those reasons, but not because of being compliant. Being compliant with lockdown regulations, doesn’t mean it is actually effective. Could be just as likely that people get more infected during the day.
Why do people (not) comply with legal regulations??
-
Internal motivation for compliance
- Either when you agree with the rule, or have internalised the norms - Informal and formal social control
- Can make an internal calculation about this (cost-benefit)
- Chance of detection
- Severity of sanctions
- Informal ➞ if everyone is doing it (the right thing) and you don’t and then everyone is looking at you, you won’t do it (because of embarrassment I guess) - Knowledge of the rules and competence in obeying the rules
Reciprocity between legal and social change
➞ laws don’t just fall out of the sky, but often originate due to social changes in society. Laws however also influence society. So they both influence each other
- E.g.: looking at same sex marriage ➞ what is influencing what? This wasn’t legal change due to the government, but because a lot of individuals were asking for this. Social change as a start. But once there is a rule which says that it is allowed, it will probably influence the society in return (more accepting), so it could lead to further legal change again as well.
(European) law in books =/= law in action
European law also isn’t always effective
Explanations for this:
- Complexity of directives
- Lack of resources of institutions to properly implement these laws
- Misfit between EU directive and domestic institutional framework
- Opposition through the backdoor (Falkner)
- The availability or the absence of veto players
Even rules, uneven practices (versluis)
= reading week 2
Versluis looked at 4 EU countries, she observed that the data sheet directive was transposed correctly into national law, but in practice it was still quite hard. There was a difference in the law of books and of actions. Versluis wanted to know why:
* None of the four countries have rigorous inspections
* Only in the Netherlands regular inspections and sanctioning non-
compliance, but limited (only 10 inspectors on thousands of
companies)
* Many companies in all four countries did not comply with the
requirements
➞ Versluis’ point was that the directive simply wasn’t important enough.
What would have changed that situation? That it wasn’t not important..? ➞ if there was a dramatic event that would have had a lot of attention, etc
Issue salience
Low level of enforcement is explained by lack of policy or issue salience (degree of attention, priority)
issue salience = refers to how important or prominent a particular issue is to the public, media, or policymakers at a given time.
- In short: how much attention or priority an issue gets
➞ vervluis: all four countries the issue was (relatively) unimportant
Versluis describes ‘issue salience’ as an important factor in explaining the implementation of European
law.
Study question - would ‘issue salience’ also be important in the process prior to the creation of a directive?
Yes, you could even be surprised that people didn’t think it was important.
Three types of business and law relationships on non-compliance
- Amoral calculation: they are neutral, and see what is more profitable: compliance or non-compliance (cost-benefit calculation)
- Political citizen: tend to support the rule of law, unless they think it is unfair
- Incompetent organisation: because of incompetence (rules unknown, lack of expertise, lack of control over subordinated, etc
explanations for the non-compliance by companies
Versluis’ research shows that companies fill out documents incorrect, incomplete or not at all. The paper does not provide any explanations for this
- They could think it isn’t important enough
- If companies aren’t under the impression that it has to be enforced
Worlds of compliance: Faulkner, hartlamp and treib
➞ they looked at 6 directives in 15 countries, which led to 91 cases. They looked at compliance by member states, and did many interviews to get to this information
They wanted to know why there is such of a difference between MS in the compliance
2 main hypothesis of Falkner
- Misfit ➞ if it fits with the existent frameworks
- Other actors that weren’t necessary involved
➞ they both lacked power, because they don really explain what is going on. These, however, didn’t work. So he started over, and started looking through the data to see how the implementations were done
