Legislative Support System to Assist in the Transfer of Skills for Municipal System Design and Ordinance Drafting

Abstract

This paper presents a legislative support system designed to facilitate the transfer of drafting skills. This system called "eLen Ordinance Database System", supports the works in ordinance drafting by providing access to a comprehensive database of approximately 1.4 million Japanese ordinances. Publicly available free since 2012, the system has been integrated into the daily routines of numerous municipal officials, who actively use the specific functions described in this paper. Beyond standard database queries, the system automatically generates ordinance comparison tables and templates for supporting legislative drafting. These features help the drafters adopt established drafting practices from existing ordinances and explore alternative administrative system designs. According our results of interviews with local government officials it is indicated that ordinance drafting prioritizes policy intent and strict adherence to conventional notation, typically building upon practices established by predecessor drafters. To address these practical needs, the system shown in the paper has used a supercomputer to evaluate similarities and dissimilarities across ordinances, thereby extracting typical patterns and unique characteristics. In practice, typicality of policies are identified within large clusters of similar ordinances, while a diverse range of policy options is uncovered by analyzing variations within those clusters.

Keywords: Clustering, Legal Drafting, Legislation Support, Big Data, Local Government

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1008125