Regulatory policy and algorithms

This work package examines how international and national regulatory policies consider the positions and well-being of silent agents. We use the phrase ‘legislative policy’ to describe the different types of guidelines, established practices, and trends for law-making. The most important agencies involved in Finnish law drafting are the OECD and the EU, various Finnish ministries and their guidelines (particularly the Ministry of Justice), the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Finnish Council of Regulatory Impact Analysis.

This work package studies the guidelines and practices that focus on impact assessment and consultation during the law drafting process. In addition, we will examine the guidelines and examples for the ex-post evaluation of legislation. We will also look at the positions of silent agents in this material, and research what methods for obtaining information are favoured by the regulatory policy. We are particularly interested in exploring the importance of computational and qualitative methods and, from the perspective of silent agents, the roles of these methods in the design and ex-post evaluation of laws. The work package will also include algorithmically based information production in computational methods; the importance of this area appears to be continually increasing for regulatory policy.

The analyses focus on:

1. the regulation of access to information using algorithms/computational methods from the perspective of silent agents;
2. the use of information-based algorithms/computational methods in the preparation of legislation on silent agents;
3. the design, implementation, and user testing of information system architecture that will be built on administrative practices, as well as the impact of these systems at the citizen level and the role of legal regulation in these processes;
4. the utilisation of algorithmic knowledge production in the implementation of laws that relate to silent agents; what algorithmic knowledge-based modeling is used when profiling risk groups and directing actions, and what does this mean for silent agents?

Consortium PI and Adjunct Professor Kati Rantala from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki leads this work package. The other members of this research team are Assistant Professor Riikka Koulu, responsible for research on algorithmic knowledge production, and the postdoctoral researcher Terhi Esko. See Research Group for more detailed contact information.