The Appraisal of Policy Appraisal – Learning About the Quality of Impact Assessment

notes: This article is based on research carried out with the support of the European Research Council (ERC) grant Analysis of Learning in Regulatory Governance, ALREG, directed by Claudio Radaelli. Dunlop, Fritsch and Radaelli gratefully acknowledge the support of the ERC. A previous version was prepared for the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) workshop on ‘Theory and Practice of Regulatory Impact Assessments in Europe’ 10 June 2013. The authors wish to express their gratitude to Ioannis Lianos and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. The usual disclaimer applies.publication-status: Acceptedtypes: ArticleFinal draftWhat do governments, international organizations and stakeholders mean when they say that proposals for new regulation should be systematically appraised? And do regulators really use the results of appraisal? In this article, we consider two dimensions of policy appraisal: the breadth and scope of the empirical analysis, and the utilization of impact assessment. We use these two dimensions to produce an explanatory typology with four types. The types enable us to review the literature systematically, exposing gaps as well as documenting the results. In the final part of the article we build hypotheses that link quality of analysis and utilization, thus showing how future research may become less descriptive and more inclined to test explicit hypotheses.European Research Council (ERC) grant Analysis of Learning in Regulatory Governance, ALRE