On February 10th Claudio Radaelli and Gaia Taffoni presented a paper based on Protego’s findings at a research seminar organized by the European Governance & Politics Programme (EGPP) of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at EUI (Fiesole). The paper is authored by Claire Dunlop, Jonathan Kamkhaji, Claudio Radaelli and Gaia Taffoni.

The presentation titled ‘When All the Pieces Do Not Fall into Place. The Design of Regulatory Policy Instruments Across the EU Member States‘ addressed a central theme of Protego that is to look at procedural instruments that open up the rule-making process from an IGT lens. Moreover, the presentation addressed the following question: how do the action situations differ in terms of rule types?

The IGT provides a powerful and theoretically robust lens to observe the fine-grained (i.e. at the individual rule type level) variability of procedures across the EU showing the features of the rules that best explain variation in our population.

Variation is only the first step of the analysis, using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) it was possible to uncover the key difference-making components of each instrument. Interestingly, the findings show that countries do not display patterns confirming conventional knowledge about distinctions between legal/public administration families, clustered Europeanization, pluralist and corporatist countries, and old and new EU members. A granular policy analysis thus uncovers patterns opposed to the broader categorizations of comparative politics and administrative law.

The event was organized in hybrid format, with participants both online and in-presence in the room ‘Refettorio’ at Badia Fiesolana. The seminar was coordinated by Professor Daniele Caramani.