Do Laws Themselves Explain the Extent of Public Authorities’ Legal Compliance?

Public authorities have an obligation to adhere to the law, but legal statutes are not always clearly formulated or easy to apply in practice. Political compromises sometimes result in ambiguous legal statutes, or societal developments can render pieces of legislation difficult to apply in practice. In Denmark, relatively high shares of local administrative decisions in social and employment policy are overturned at the Board of Appeals. This has resulted in critique of local authorities’ ability to administer citizens’ legal rights. Previous studies indicate that organizational as well as budgetary factors play a role in explaining differences in the legal performance across local administrations. We do not know what explains the variation across paragraphs in the share of overturned decisions, however. In this study, we use survey responses of local case-workers to evaluate different dimensions of the legal statutes themselves that may influence their ability to apply them correctly. We use registry data on 225.000 decisions taken by the Board of Appeal from 2014-2023 on the legality of local administrative decisions in Denmark to measure legal compliance. Authors: Carina S. Bischoff, Associate Professor Roskilde University Bjarke Lund-Sørensen, PhD researcher Roskilde University Bettina Lemann Kristiansen, Professor Århus University