Understanding Regulatory Rules using the Institutional Grammar 2.0

Scholars of public administration and public policy have long been interested in understanding the implementation and efficacy of regulation. Over the last decade there has been increased interest in understanding the design (i.e., content) of regulation as a basis for understanding how regulations are administered and whether they achieve their intended goals. Within this line of research, scholars have been particularly interested in investigating regulatory dynamics relating specifically to features and patterns of regulatory text, and have engaged a variety of methodological approaches to support their assessments of such. One approach prominently featured in this research is the Institutional Grammar. The Institutional Grammar supports syntactic and semantic classification of the rules that embed within regulatory text. A recently revised version of the Institutional Grammar – Institutional Grammar 2.0 – further supports robust and reliable coding of regulatory text by supporting: (i) comprehensive representations of rules that embed in regulatory text along a generalizable syntax; (ii) accommodating coding of the heterogenous forms of rules often encountered in regulatory language; and (iii) supporting computational analysis and modeling of regulatory rules in real world and simulated settings. This paper (i) provides a brief introduction to the Institutional Grammar 2.0; (ii) discusses the theoretical and analytical advantages of using the Institutional Grammar 2.0 to study regulatory rules; (iii) and presents an application showcasing the use of the Institutional Grammar 2.0 to study regulatory design.