# Computational Social Science, the Evolution of Policy Design and Rule Making in Smart Societies
## 4 Computational Social Science and Policy Design: Making Smarter Public Choices
The latter aimed to simulate the effects of policies in order to assist governments throughout the process of their development. Beyond the albeit significant scientific results, marked by a consistent number of relevant publications [2; 19; 54; 55], the above-mentioned projects share the credit of enhancing the debate over the intersections between policy modeling and science promoting, at the same time, the creation of an interdisciplinary research community. As the result of their activities somehow shows, CSS research is gradually driving a deep innovation in policy design. The methodologies and the tools developed bycomputational social scientists seem indeed to be helpful in different fundamental steps of the policy cycle from the identification of the solutions that are more appropriate to implement the policy to decision-making and _evaluation_ (see Figure 3), opening up new prospects and new scenarios. A reasonable question at this point is: how can the insights potentially deriving from CSS methodologies concretely be implemented into the policy design process? A crucial role is expected to be played, in this vein, by the rule-making procedures and, in more detail, by the legal mechanisms regulating the formulation and evaluation of public policies.The issue is strictly connected with the goal of a higher 'quality of regulation' [57], an increasingly important concern on the agenda of national and international institutions. In the last twenty years, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has produced several documents on the topic adopting, in 2012, a document (\"_Recommendation on regulatory policy and governance_\") [58] that contains detailed international guidelines on the quality of regulation. The EU, in its turn, has been moving in the same direction actively promoting the creation of tools to ensure the the quality of norms discussing, since the early 1990s, new ideas and practices to assess the impact of both policies and rules implementing them. More recently, the subject has been widely analyzed within the context of the White Paper on Governance [59] in which the European Commission expressly emphasizes the need to improve the quality, the simplicity and the effectiveness of regulatory acts. The concept of 'quality regulation', the idea of a regulation capable, among other things, of clearly identifying policy goals and being effective in achieving them, involves both the process that leads to the adoption of norms and their results. With reference to the rule-making process, three different instruments are relevant in our perspective: the _regulatory impact analysis_, _citizens' involvement_ and the _ex post evaluation_. _Regulatory Impact Analysis_ (RIA) is a methodology aiming to evaluate the potential impact of a given piece of legislation before its adoption. The RIA translates into a socio-economic assessment aiming to compare the effect on citizens, enterprises and public administrations potentially deriving from different hypotheses of regulatory intervention. The analysis aims to guide policy-makers to the adoption of more efficient and effective choices while making more explicit the reasons for the choices made. Based on qualitative analysis and, where possible, on the collection of quantitative data, the RIA is also a tool to ensure the coherence and integration of policies, as it requires decision-makers to assess the impact of sectorial policies in other contexts. Figure 3: The policy cycle (source: adapted from ref.[56]). Citizens' involvement_ in the design of public policy is typically achieved through consultations, in particular through the _notice and comments_ mechanism that consists in seeking public comments on the specific issues to be settled.