[Paper Review] Governing Governance

Thomas C. King|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jan 1, 2016

Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation13 references20 citations

TL;DR

This paper introduces PARAGon, a formal framework for analyzing institutional design and enactment governance using Searle's 'counts-as' rules. It enables automated reasoning about compliance in multi-level governance, explains non-compliance through minimal rule modifications, and formalizes secondary legal rules to determine when institutional changes are legally valid, offering a mathematically rigorous, implementable approach to institutional reasoning in complex regulatory environments.

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is motivated by the need, in today's globalist world, for a precise way to enable governments, organisations and other regulatory bodies to evaluate the constraints they place on themselves and others. An organisation's modus operandi is enacting and fulfilling contracts between itself and its participants. Yet, organisational contracts should respect external laws, such as those setting out data privacy rights and liberties. Contracts can only be enacted by following contract law processes, which often require bilateral agreement and consideration. Governments need to legislate whilst understanding today's context of national and international governance hierarchy where law makers shun isolationism and seek to influence one another. Governments should avoid punishment by respecting constraints from international treaties and human rights charters. Governments can only enact legislation by following their own, pre-existing, law making procedures. In other words, institutions, such as laws and contracts are designed and enacted under constraints.

Motivation & Objective

• To address the challenge of understanding and managing institutional constraints in complex governance systems, especially in multi-level governance contexts.
• To formalize the constraints on institutional design and enactment, particularly secondary legal rules that govern when and how institutions can be changed.
• To provide a mechanism for identifying minimal, intention-preserving corrections to non-compliant institutional designs.
• To support automated governance in large-scale, heterogeneous systems such as sensor networks by enabling formal, traceable reasoning about institutional compliance.
• To bridge the gap between legal philosophy and symbolic AI by formalizing abstract concepts like 'counts-as' rules into computationally tractable models.

Proposed method

• Uses Searle’s 'counts-as' rules (e.g., 'A counts-as B in context C') as the foundational mechanism to model institutional constitutions and social reality construction.
• Develops a formal logic framework to represent and reason about multi-level governance, where higher-level institutions (e.g., human rights charters) constrain lower-level ones (e.g., national laws).
• Employs rule-modifying counts-as rules to formalize secondary legal rules—such as 'a government vote counts-as enacting a new rule'—to model the legality of institutional change over time.
• Introduces a computational mechanism to generate minimal explanations for non-compliance by identifying the smallest set of rule additions, deletions, or modifications needed to restore compliance.
• Applies the framework to real-world case studies, including EU data privacy laws and sensor network governance, to validate its practical applicability.
• Integrates the formal model with a computational implementation to enable automated reasoning and verification of institutional designs and changes.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How can institutional constraints in multi-level governance be formally represented and reasoned about using counts-as rules?
• RQ2 What is the minimal set of rule modifications required to correct a non-compliant institutional design while preserving the original design intent?
• RQ3 How can secondary legal rules—governing the legality of institutional change—be formalized as rule-modifying counts-as rules?
• RQ4 In what ways can the framework support automated reasoning about the enactment and compliance of institutional changes over time?
• RQ5 How does the framework handle the dynamic interplay between changing social contexts and rule validity during institutional change?

Key findings

• The PARAGon framework successfully formalizes multi-level governance by enabling logical inference about whether lower-level regulations violate higher-level norms, such as EU directives or human rights charters.
• The framework generates minimal, intention-preserving explanations for non-compliance by identifying the smallest number of rule changes needed to achieve compliance, ensuring design fidelity.
• It provides a formal mechanism to determine whether a rule change counts-as legally valid by modeling the temporal and contextual dependencies of secondary legal rules.
• The framework was validated through real-world case studies, including compliance checks for data privacy regulations and governance in large-scale sensor networks.
• The integration of formal logic with computational implementation enables automated, predictable, and transparent reasoning about institutional design and change.
• The approach demonstrates that abstract legal and philosophical concepts—such as institutional constitution and rule modification—can be rendered computationally tractable and verifiable.