Navigating "Wicked Problems" in Public Policy: The Power and Promise of Using SHAMROQ's Transdisciplinary Approach to Find Regulatory Text Patterns – A Mixed Method Study

Abstract

In an era marked by significant public policy challenges, including climate change, public health, and economic inequality, traditional bureaucratic or technocratic methods prove increasingly inadequate. These so-called "wicked problems," characterized by their complexity and resistance to simple solutions, require more dynamic, inclusive approaches, that transcend jurisdictional boundaries. Embracing these approaches, we extend SHAMROQ, a novel transdisciplinary approach that combines Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, and Logic to extract, classify, and model deontic expressions from regulatory texts. This mixed-method study examines three CFR titles: Title 16 Commercial Practices, Title 45 Public Welfare, and Title 48 Federal Acquisition Regulations Systems, with an emphasis on the distribution of deontic expressions and identifying challenges in regulatory text. The results, supported by a chi-square test of independence with a highly significant p-value