Who Speaks for the Region: Information Supply and the Making of Subnational Law

Abstract

A subnational statute is the end of an information chain. Someone is elected, someone staffs the chamber, someone supplies the account of the problem, someone drafts, and someone is supposed to review what resulted. This study treats that chain as the object of analysis and asks what the empirical literature establishes about each link. The method is a structured conceptual review of research published between 2017 and 2024 across legislative behaviour, subnational regulation, constitutional adjudication and the comparative measurement of regional authority. Five findings follow. Every link for which evidence exists carries a documented distortion, and no link corrects the one before it. Representation reforms deliver competence without dismantling the structures that constrain it. Legislative staff systematically misperceive the preferences of those they serve, in patterns shaped by which external groups supply them with information, so the account of a regional problem that reaches the drafting table is the account most readily supplied. Preparation is rarely performed even though ex ante impact assessment reduces the hazard of first modification by thirty-two to forty-two per cent. And the terminal link is largely missing: a nationwide survey of provincial legislative rules of procedure found 93.1 per cent with no formalised post-adoption scrutiny at all, with a single province showing comprehensive implementation, while the administrative review mechanism that once invalidated thousands of subnational regulations was removed without an equivalent replacement. The study argues that subnational legislative quality is a property of the information chain rather than of drafting skill.