The role of textual data in a statistical approach for the evaluation of the regulatory impact

The evaluation of Public Intervention is currently considered a strategic element of political and administrative actions. The first step for evaluating public policies consists in applying the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA). Usually, an economical and/or a juridical viewpoint is adopted. The paper shows how quantitative methods can be useful for an ex-ante evaluation of public actions having a significant impact on people lives. A statistical approach based on Conjoint Analysis has been proposed by Scepi, et al. (2008). Thanks to this technique, developed in the frame of market research, it is possible to compare different potential actions, described by several indicators, and to estimate utilities for groups of judges. It is well-known that one of the main problems in performing a Conjoint Analysis consists in data collection. The most common procedure is the so called full profile method, which forces to deal with a small number of categorical variables (and with a small number of categories). Being based on an experimental design, it is often too rigid. Moreover, in the frame of RIA, the choice of descriptors is difficult. Here we propose a procedure based on Conjoint Analysis with textual information (Balbi, et al., 2008), where judges are asked to enrich their own choice with a free description of the desired action. An empirical analysis on alternative University systems in Italy shows the effectiveness of our proposal.