Gold-Plating and Other Challenges for Multilevel Legislative Cycles

This paper aims to address how gold-plating is a complex concept that designates plural situations where the implementation of the European Union legislation by the Member State exceeds what the legal act requires when the law internally approved surpasses the material, the personal, temporal or the territorial scope of the Directive, jeopardizing the legislative harmonization underlining the European Lawmaker‘s intentions. The problem can also be verified when the legislator is not observing rules enforced by international treaties that must be respected nationally. Consequently, this “overregulation“ can impact the Public Administration, the private sector (market), and citizens, imposing burdens and costs that were not envisaged by the primary legislation.

This paper aims to reflect on the conceptual elements of the gold-plating and over-regulation phenomena, to identify the instances in which it occurs and how to classify them on the types of harms that they may cause, and the positive externalities that may have motivated them - from environmental protection to consumer welfare. Some methodologies for this identification and classification will be proposed, which will be employed to analyze practical case studies for reciprocal learning. The aim of this panel will be to discuss the methodological approaches (and its findings) to highlight their issues and propose possible solutions to the overregulation phenomenon, useful to achieve a “better regulation“ in different legislative realities.

This paper aims to present the overregulation phenomenon in different countries highlighting its problems and consequences. In order to achieve that, theoretical reflections, methodological approaches adopted to measure costs/benefits, and case studies will be explored to understand what negative or positive impacts result from the phenomenon. In this perspective, this presentation will focus on the legislative inflation happening in Brazil, which has a federative state model, presenting studies realized by the Observatory for the Quality of Law, in Minas Gerais State. The paper will reflect on the competencies of the legislator to act, the efficiency of the regulation that has been done and how it can impact the quality of the democracy in the country.