Author: Colin Scott

Colin Scott is Principal, UCD College of Social Sciences and Law and Professor of EU Regulation and Governance at UCD. He is a Co-Editor of Legal Studies (Wiley-Blackwell).

Conference on Constitutional Reform

There has been a fair amount of discussion on this blog about issues of constitutional reform. Some readers may be interested in a interdisciplinary conference to be held on Friday afternoon, 21st May, at the Clarion Hotel, IFSC which includes contributions from economists, political scientists and lawyers on the question ‘Does Ireland need Constitutional Reform. Programme below and further details from eoin.carolan@ucd.ie.

The UCD Constitutional Studies Group presents a conference on
Does Ireland need constitutional reform?
with the support of the School of Law, UCD.

Clarion Hotel, IFSC
May 21st, 2010.

Conference schedule

Session 1: Why constitutional reform?
1.00pm: An Iterative Constitution: dynamics of a rule-based legal system – Dr. Stephen Kinsella.
1.20pm: Re-placing the Constitution in the context of reform – Dr. Maria Cahill.
1.40pm: The problems of public understanding and constitutional reform – Dr. Oran Doyle.
2.00pm: Questions and discussion.

Session 2: Electoral and parliamentary reform
2.20pm: Reforming the Seanad – Senator Ivana Bacik.
2. 40pm: Is electoral reform the wrong answer to the right question? – Prof. David Farrell.
3.00pm: “Relaying the playing field – Implications of political reform for the constitutional law ground rules of political competition – Dr. John O’Dowd.
3.20pm: Questions and discussion.

3.45pm: Coffee break.

Session 3: Improving public governance
4.00pm: Sacred spaces and blurred boundaries: Administrative reform and constitutional governance – Muiris MacCarthaigh.
4.20pm: Enhancing government accountability to the Oireachtas – Eoin O’Malley
4.40pm: An accountability branch of government? – Dr. Eoin Carolan
5.00pm: The place of the media in the constitution – Dr. Carol Coulter.
5.20pm: Questions and discussion.

5.45pm: Close of conference.

The Costs of Reorganising Government

In yesterday’s speech the Taoiseach said:

Restructuring of Departments and agencies inevitably entails disruption and costs but I am satisfied that with the changes I am making, the benefits will outweigh the cost…

Costs, of course, include changes to name-plates, stationery, web-sites and so on, as well as the HR dimension of moving staff around. Benefits are more problematic. The UK National Audit Office has recently reported on Reorganising Central Government and concluded that the UK government has averaged £200M a year over the last few years on reorganisations of government departments and other units, but with scant evidence that such expenditures are justified. They state:

Central government bodies are weak at identifying and securing the benefits they hope to gain from reorganisation.

The NAO makes a number of proposals for more systematic evaluation before reorganisations take place, the establishment of a central team ‘with oversight and advance warning of all government reorganisations’ and better parliamentary scrutiny. There is, of course, a problem with such analysis in that reorganisations of the kind announced by the Irish Government yesterday are chiefly driven by political concerns. They are significant as much for what they symbolise as for what they may achieve by way of enhancing governmental capacity for action.

Whoops

Novelist John Lanchester is giving a public lecture at the London School of Economics this coming Thursday linked to the launch of his new book, Whoops  – an anlysis of the financial crisis. The FT and the Sunday Times both carried extracts over the weekend. I was particularly struck by his comments on behavioural economics:

I have a confession to make about Kahneman and Tversky. I’d never heard of them until Kahneman won the Nobel, and when I first read about their work it seemed to me to consist of things that were surprising only to economists.

You can read the full extract here.

Nobel for Ostrom and Williamson

See the BBC Report here. As a non-economist it is intriguing to have the prize awarded to to two people whose work (separately and not jointly) has profoundly shaped the fields of regulation and law in which I work. I wondered what the impact of their  research had been on the field of economics in Ireland.

Government Statement on Economic Regulation

This statement was published yesterday (hat tip to Jonathan Westrup) and contains many proposals for developing regulatory capacity in Ireland. Amongst the most interesing are the proposal to increase the transparency of strategy and results for regulators and to enhance the monitoring capacity of departments over agencies, new networking arrangements between departments and agencies (an annual forum) and between agencies and stakeholders and increased support (within current resources, of course) for research and training in regulation. The statement is underpinned by a report on economic regulation in Ireland completed earlier in the year by the Economists Intelligence Unit and also published yesterday here.