Measuring Legislative Predictability : The Case of the Kingdom of Jordan and Implications for the MENA Region

Laws and regulations represent a central tool for governments to achieve policy objectives, and they also represent a fundamental condition for making desirable individual and business decisions. While laws and regulations regularly have to be adapted to changing circumstances, frequent and sudden modifications indicate legislative unpredictability and are expected to impose considerable costs on citizens and businesses. Legislative predictability is assumed to be the consequence of high-quality laws, and existing evidence shows that regulatory management systems indeed impact legislative predictability. This paper proposes and implements an innovative legislative big data analytics approach to measuring legislative predictability in the Kingdom of Jordan and selected global comparator countries. It also maps out the feasibility of such an approach for the wider Middle East and North Africa region. Legislative data gathered from official government sources point to the high frequency of modifications in Jordan compared to a wide range of countries where data are available Around 10 to 15 percent of the original laws have been modified within 24 months of enactment over the past 20 years. In addition to prevalent modifications of new laws, even older laws face a comparatively high risk of modification in Jordan. Additional data collection following the template outlined in this paper could deliver a comparative data set, enabling a better understanding of the drivers and trends of legislative predictability and hence better evidence-based policies.