Soft Law, Policy Rules and the Quality of Administrative Decision-Making

Abstract

To the extent that an administrative body has discretionary powers, it will inevitably make use of administrative guidelines or administrative rules that supplement rules in laws and statutes. These administrative rules are the soft law every organization applies in decision-making. In Dutch law, there is a category of administrative rules with a special legal status. They are called "policy rules" in de General Administrative Law Act (Awb). Especially administrative bodies in municipalities often use other administrative rules than policy rules. In other words, municipalities use administrative rules that do not (entirely) fit the legal requirements of the Awb "policy rule". Apparently, municipal authorities can do without administrative rules in their codified form of "policy rule". This observation was the immediate cause for conducting this research. The central question of this paper is: What is the supplemental value of policy rules for the quality of the municipal decision-making and is it possible to improve this quality with policy rules?

Keywords: Soft law, regulation, codification, administrative law, bureaucracies

JEL Classification: K23, D73