Evaluation of Legislation: Skating on Thin Ice

Abstract

While parliaments and politicians increasingly call for the evaluation of legislation, the methodological implications of statutes as an evaluand have not received much interest. This article explores the challenges and methods of evaluating statutes. It describes the methodology and the costs of eight all-encompassing evaluations of statutes at Swiss federal level. It then presents approaches to evaluating statutes. A distinction is made between statutes with the aim of problem-solving and those relating to social ordering. While the former are concerned with a ‘policy’ (objectives combined with intervention instruments), the latter are concerned with the ‘basic order’, which regulates the rights and indirectly the interactions of various actors, but which does not seek a specific outcome. A good part of the legislation aimed at problem-solving can be broken down into its main components; the evaluation of these components does not necessarily differ from the evaluation of programmes. Quite often, however, this approach is not feasible for various reasons. Strategies are presented to evaluate statutes in a more comprehensive manner.