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What makes policy complex?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2023

Roman Senninger Open the ORCID record for Roman Senninger [Opens in a new window]
Roman Senninger*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
*
Corresponding author. Email: rsenninger@ps.au.dk
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Abstract

Previous research finds that policy complexity affects important political processes including legislative delegation and policy diffusion. However, policy complexity is not directly observable and the search for a reasonable proxy constitutes a major challenge for scholars. This research note presents a concise and measurable definition of complex policy based on two aspects: a policy's textual sophistication and its ties to other rules and regulations. Using crowdsourcing and a pairwise comparison framework it is shown that the proposed defining features are crucial for humans’ understanding of policy text. The proposed definition is then operationalized using a large corpus of European Union rules and is shown to outperform alternative operationalizations of policy complexity in predicting the level of legislative delegation.

Keywords

Public policyPolicy complexityLegislative delegationText and content analysisPairwise comparison
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 2023 , pp. 913 - 920
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at EPSA 2019, APSA 2019, and Harvard University.

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IPW0M9
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