WP1. Legal and Regulatory Mapping

This work package, led by the Hertie School of Governance, has been designed to map and understand the level of transparency of 35 jurisdictions researched by DIGIWHIST (28 EU member states, Armenia, Georgia, Iceland, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and the European Commission). It investigates where particular risks lie in terms of public spending and the regulation of top politicians’ and bureaucrats’ integrity and aims to improve trust in governments and the efficiency of public spending across Europe.

Researchers in this work package are creating the following products: (1) a repository of online public procurement data sources and a description of the data provided, and (2) a database of legal and regulatory norms – European Public Accountability Mechanisms (EuroPAM).

1. The repository of online public procurement data sources and the description of data content will be prepared as an online report containing all the hyperlinks and references. Having considerable value on its own, it also serves as a crucial input for the data collection in WP2, as a clear data template can be prepared from it. It also functions as a ‘living document’ that will be updated throughout the project whenever public procurement legislation changes. Most notable among these changes is the expected transposition of the new public procurement directive by April 2016.

2. The database of legal and regulatory norms or EuroPAM is an extension of the Public Accountability Mechanisms Initiative (PAM) of the World Bank, which is a primary data collection effort that produces assessments of in-law and in-practice efforts to enhance the transparency of public administration and the accountability of public officials. It serves as a European transparency legislation observatory that is based on the PAM indicators for financial disclosure, conflict of interest restrictions, and freedom of information, while also adding data on public procurement, and updating the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) database on political financing. To ensure the reliability of in-law data, a rigorous and systematic approach is applied to data collection and analysis. Researchers produce summaries of the legal provisions collected from primary source documents, in the original language – where possible. Following the preliminary analysis performed by researchers, the data is sent to technical in-country experts for feedback on accuracy and relevance. Country experts are intended to have either in-depth legal knowledge of the mechanism being examined in a specific country or expertise in a related field. The final data is released in both quantitative and qualitative form for policy and research purposes. Several rounds of data collection are envisioned from 2012 onwards. EuroPAM provides a solid basis for the indicator development in WP3.