Why meta‐research matters to regulation and governance scholarship: An illustrative evidence synthesis of responsive regulation research

Abstract

This article is an introduction to meta‐research, a systematic and replicable process of synthesizing research findings across a body of original research. After introducing the reader to the core of meta‐research methodology, meta‐research logic and tools are applied to present an evidence synthesis of empirical research on responsive regulation. The article concludes with a meta‐research agenda for regulation and governance scholarship, and five key lessons from the empirical responsive regulation literature.

Risk as an Approach to Regulatory Governance: An Evidence Synthesis and Research Agenda

“…Following the conventional evidence synthesis practice, I have let the literature do the talking to this point. Strikingly, the issues that I have identified and the insights that I have collected above overlap, to some extent, with other evidence syntheses of the regulatory governance literature that I have carried out—for example, on the use of behavioral insights in regulatory practice (van der Heijden, 2020) and responsive regulation (van der Heijden, 2021). What follows is, in part, inspired not only by the current evidence synthesis, but by my broader interest in synthesizing the available knowledge on regulatory governance.…”

“…The evidence synthesis includes peer-reviewed publications from the fields of law, political science, and public administration. Following conventional practice for the type of evidence synthesis presented here, documents were sourced from the Web of Science database (Gough et al, 2012; Heyvaert et al, 2017; Moher et al, 2009; van der Heijden, 2021). A keyword search was used to capture a workable set of publications that engage with risk-based regulatory governance.…”

“…Two broad motivations discussed in the broader evidence synthesis literature underpin this article (for discussions of this literature, see van der Heijden, 2021; van der Heijden & Kuhlmann, 2018). First, synthesizing the knowledge created through studies of risk-based regulatory governance and drawing lessons that may be assumed to hold across a wide variety of settings—possibly beyond the populations or cases included in the original studies (Brady & Collier, 2004; King et al, 1994; Larsson, 2009).…”

Behavioral responsive regulation: Bringing together responsive regulation and behavioral public policy

“…The foundations for BPP were laid in the 1970s and 1980s by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who criticized the neoclassical model of human behavior as a rational calculus. In a series of groundbreaking papers, Tversky and Kahneman (Tversky & Kahneman 1974;Kahneman & Tversky 1979) showed that people consistently depart from the standard economic model of rational judgment and decisionmaking. Our evaluation of information is biased by mental shortcuts and rules of thumb that are often efficient, yet also lead to predictable mistakes (bounded rationality); we compromise our own self-interest in ways that often violate the axioms of expected utility theory (bounded selfinterest); and our willpower is tempered by impulse and short-termism that significantly hinders our ability to achieve our desired goals (bounded willpower, Jolls et al 1998).…”

The Value of Systems Thinking for and in Regulatory Governance: An Evidence Synthesis

“…From there, it presents an evidence synthesis of the peer-reviewed academic literature on systems thinking applied to regulatory governance (Section 4: Evidence synthesis). Evidence syntheses are gaining traction in the social sciences, including in public policy and public administration studies (of which regulatory scholarship is a subfield; van der Heijden, 2021b). They fit a broader trend of meta-research or metascience: “an approach in which science turns the lens of scrutiny on itself” (Schooler, 2014, p. 9).…”