Abstract
The objective of this study is to analyze results of interviews that we conducted with Japanese municipal officials who have engaged in legislative drafting and to present main issues addressed by the interviewees. Moreover, based on the results of analysis, it aims to clarify remaining problems that legislators face with during legislation, which will be necessary conditions for expanding and improving human-centered functions of e-legislation systems. Using qualitative analysis of interviews with municipal officers, this paper identifies the following four issues addressed by interviewees: (1) inconsistency among ordinances; (2) inconsistency of an ordinance; (3) insufficiency in consideration of legislative objectives and facts; (4) inadequacy of legal research. Based on the results of interview analysis, this study clarifies whether the eLen regulation database system copes with them and discusses remaining problems. Overall, it illustrates that some functions included in the eLen are helpful for diminishing those issues. However, in order to overcome the problems with which legislators face in the process of legislation, the results of this study show that it is significant to provide legislators education, such as trainings for the way to use the system and benchmarking method or for learning legislation process. Although the eLen has already implemented several instructive mechanisms, we will improve further the system so that users can learn the proper process of legislation through the usage of the system.
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Notes
- 1.
The respondents of surveys are as follows: City of Yokohama, Kawasaki, Sagamihara, Yokosuka, Hiratsuka, Kamakura, Fujisawa, Odawara, Chigasaki, Zushi, Miura, Hatano, Atsugi, Yamato, Isehara, Ebina, Zama, Minamiashigara, Ayase, Town of Hayama, Samukawa, Ooiso, Ninomiya, Nakai, Ooi, Matsuda, Yamakita, Kaisei, Hakone, Manazuru, Yugawara, Aikawa and Village of Kiyokawa. Although an interview and questionnaire were also conducted with the Kanagawa Prefectural Government during the same survey period, the results have been excluded due to many differences between prefectures and other scales of municipalities. In addition, respondents’ comments are not representative of the municipality’s views, but their opinions. The municipality’s names are hidden in this paper, since some of them would not like to disclose their names.
- 2.
The sentence in a bracket was inserted by the authors for giving a supplementary explanation of the remark of the interviewee.
- 3.
The extended version of the eLen can automatically create a template by extracting common parts from similar regulations clustered by AI. In the template, different parts of regulations are shown as blanks and users can select one of choices to complete the regulation. If you change clustered groups, various templates can be automatically created by the eLen.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by SECOM Science and Technology Foundation and JST, CREST, Grant Number JPMJCR1782, Japan.
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Shima, A., Kakuta, T. (2020). Qualitative Analysis of Interviews with Municipal Officers Toward the Human-Centered Improvement of the eLen Regulation Database System. In: Kreps, D., Komukai, T., Gopal, T.V., Ishii, K. (eds) Human-Centric Computing in a Data-Driven Society. HCC 2020. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 590. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62803-1_8
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