The Role of Political Ideology in the Structural Design of New Governance Agencies

This paper employs theories of structural politics and delegation to develop a set of propositions about the legislative delegation of authority to quasi-governmental entities, known as "quangos." Legislators have incentives to condition their choice of structure for an organization charged with implementing policy on their own political attitudes toward "good government." The quasi-independence of quangos provides credibility for legislators to commit to a process that takes policy making out of their hands while creating a structure that increases the likelihood of achieving their policy goals. Theoretical implications are empirically examined using data on the financial autonomy of Dutch public bodies. The results support the argument that it is important to consider politicians' ideologies directly in governance studies because they form the key component of structural politics.     

Reining in the Bureaucrats: Democratic Transition and Administrative Procedural Reform in Korea

How do civilian presidents control their bureaucracies after taking over from an authoritarian regime? To answer this question, I develop a “reining in” theory of delegation. I argue that presidents who faces intrabranch conflict over policy issues and cannot appoint—and dismiss—freely will solve their delegation problems through administrative procedure acts (APAs) and related laws. While some scholars argue that APAs are tools for preserving the status quo, I find that APAs help presidents change policy. Building on the delegation literature from economics, my theory represents a more general argument than prior theories for why presidents support APAs. I test the theory through a case study of South Korea's first civilian government (post‐1961), under President Kim Young Sam. Kim initiated an APA to rein in a professionalized civil service that opposed his policy preferences. Strict procedural requirements designed to keep tabs on bureaucratic activities enhanced Kim's control over his bureaucracy.     

The Contested Council: Conflict Dimensions of an Intergovernmental EU Institution

Recent research has tried to uncover the political space in which the Council of Ministers of the European Union decides. Rather than the left-right conflict or a cleavage between governments with national and supranational attitudes, this article shows that a redistributive dimension, decisively shapes the interactions in this most important legislative body of the European Union. In contrast to extant studies, we employ ex ante rather than ex post preference data and rely on correspondence analysis as a means to identify the underlying dimensions of contestation. The article concludes with an empirical investigation of how enlargement will affect the emerging political space within the European Union. Our quantitative analysis suggests that the gulf between net-contributors and net-receivers will further deepen.     

Capital, Trade, and the Political Economies of Reform

Existing approaches to the study of economic reform have focused on the mobilization of special interests that oppose liberalization and have tended to assume that reform dynamics follow a similar logic across distinct policy arenas. Analysis of the dynamics of capital account and trade liberalization in 19 Latin American countries between 1985 and 1999 demonstrates otherwise. Movement toward liberalization is shaped systematically by the timing and salience of each reform's distributional costs and partisan political dynamics. In turn, the timing and magnitude of costs are mediated by the economic context, while salience depends on the informational environment. Our findings thus differ from the conventional wisdom on several scores, particularly by emphasizing the ways in which good rather than bad economic conditions can facilitate reforms, the conditionality of legislative politics of reform enactment on whether reforms are characterized by ex ante conflict or fears of ex post blame, and how the type of reform shapes its political dynamics .     

The Institutional Power of Western European Parliaments: A Multidimensional Analysis

Parliaments are more than legislative bodies. However, we lack an adequate understanding of the theoretical relationship between different facets of parliamentary activity or ‘parliamentary functions’. Relying on the principal–agent framework, this article argues theoretically that parliamentary power is a multidimensional concept comprising three distinct mechanisms to ensure policy outputs in line with the collective preferences of parliaments: direct influence on policymaking, the ex ante selection of external officeholders, and the ex post control of the cabinet. These mechanisms mirror the classic legislative, electoral, and control functions of parliaments. Empirically, the paper uses factor analysis of newly developed indicators for electoral powers and established measures of legislative and control resources to show that the institutional powers of 15 Western European parliaments comprise four distinct dimensions. These dimensions match the three theoretically derived mechanisms with committee power as an additional factor. Locating the 15 parliaments in this multidimensional space of parliamentary powers demonstrates that classifications based solely on lawmaking lead to biased assessments of parliamentary strength and weakness. Instead, the paper provides a more nuanced picture of the ways in which Western European parliaments can influence policymaking under the conditions of delegation.     

Getting Their Way: Bias and Deference to Trial Courts

How much do trial judges influence the law in the United States? I analyze a model of adjudication by a trial judge who engages in fact finding before deciding a case, but whose decision may be reversed. The model makes three broad points. First, it provides an informational rationale for ex post deference to biased trial judges that does not require an ex ante commitment by an appellate court to a standard of review. Second, it shows how procedural discretion can bring biased trial judges' rulings closer to appellate doctrine despite enabling trial judges to “get their way” more often. Third, de facto law as represented by trial judges' case‐by‐case adjudication will differ substantially from de jure law. As long as there are not too many extremist trial judges, de facto law will reflect the predispositions of trial judges, not legal doctrine.     

Political parties in parliamentary democracies: Making delegation and accountability work

Abstract. In modern democracies political parties exist because (1) they reduce transaction costs in the electoral, parliamentary and governmental arenas and (2) help overcome the dilemma of collective action. In Western Europe political parties are the central mechanism to make the constitutional chain of political delegation and accountability work in practice. Party representatives in public office are ultimately the agents of the extra–parliamentary party organization. In order to contain agency loss parties rely on party–internal mechanisms and the institutionalisation of party rights in public rules and, in contrast to US parties, they apply the full range of ex ante and ex post mechanisms. Generally, the role of party is weaker the further down the chain of delegation.     

For fear of popular politics? Public attention and the delegation of authority to the United States executive branch

Legislators are thought to delegate policymaking authority to administrative actors either to avoid blame for controversial policy or to secure policy outcomes. This study tests these competing perspectives and establishes that public attention to policymaking is a powerful predictor of the extent to which significant United States statutes delegate authority to the executive branch. Consistent with the policy‐concerns perspective, by one calculation statutes dealing with high‐attention issues entail 48 percent fewer delegating provisions than statutes dealing with low‐attention issues – a far stronger relationship than is typically found in the delegation literature. As per the blame‐avoidance perspective, a number of additional analyses yield results consistent with the notion that fears about future public attention motivate statutory delegation if legislative conflict is sufficiently great. Overall, however, the results suggest that conflict typically is not sufficiently great and that legislators are generally more inclined to limit statutory delegation when the public is paying attention.     

The power of process: State capacity and climate policy

State capacity is central to the provision of public goods, including environmental protection. Drawing on climate policy making, this article argues that the division of labor between the bureaucracy and legislature in policy formulation is a critical source of state capacity. In cases of bureaucratic policy design, the legislature sets policy goals and delegates policy design to bureaucracies. This division of labor shifts distributional conflict to autonomous bureaucracies, allowing for effective policy design. California followed this path in climate policy making, setting it on track to meet climate goals. In cases of legislative policy design, bureaucracies set goals and legislatures design policy measures. Since legislators have incentives to respond to vested interests, legislative policy design is vulnerable to regulatory capture. In Germany, legislative policy design in climate policy making is preventing attainment of emissions reduction goals, as industry interests succeeded in blocking key policy measures. Our findings highlight procedural sources of state capacity.     

International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders: Is War Still Ex Post Inefficient?

Recent work in comparative politics and international relations has shown a marked shift toward leaders as the theoretical unit of analysis. In most of the new theoretical models a core assumption is that leaders act to stay in power. There exists, however, remarkably little systematic empirical knowledge about the factors that affect the tenure of leaders. To provide a baseline of empirical results we explore how a broad range of domestic and international factors affects the tenure of leaders. We focus in particular on the effect of conflict and its outcome. We find that political institutions fundamentally mediate the costs and benefits of international conflict and that war is not necessarily ex post inefficient for leaders. This suggests that the assumption that war is ex post inefficient for unitary rational actors can not be simply extended to leaders. Therefore, a focus on leaders may yield important new rationalist explanations for war .     

A Comparative Assessment of Elite Policy Recruits in Canada

Recent case studies and large-N survey evidence has confirmed long-suspected shortages of public sector “policy capacity”. Studies have found that government policy workers in various jurisdictions differ considerably with respect to types of policy work they undertake, and have identified uneven capacity for policy workers to access and apply technical and scientific knowledge to public issues. This suggests considerable difficulties for government’s ability to meet contemporary policy and governance challenges. Despite growing attention to these matters, studies have not examined the “elite” policy workers many governments recruit to address these capacity shortages. Using an established survey instrument, this study of two Canadian recruitment programs provides the first comparative analysis of elite policy recruits, as policy workers. Three research questions anchor the study: (1) What is the profile of these actors? (2) What types of policy work do “elite” policy analysts actually engage in? (3) How does their policy work compare by recruitment program? The article provides fresh comparative data on the nature of elite policy work and policy analytical capacity, but, more importantly, a crucial baseline for future comparative study of how elite recruitment may facilitate “supply-side” capacity gains expected from recruitment programs.     

Quangos与澳门政府自治机构：兼与香港比较

在西方国家除了政府部门架构以外，而同样提供公共服务的其它所有组织类别，都普遍被通称为“quangos”（quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organizations），即半自主非官方机构。据文菲尔（Sandra Van Thiel），quangos是“被赋予执行一个或多个公共政策为其主要任务的一些组织，它们由公帑支持但运作上与政府保持距离，且与部长或主管部门并无上下层级关系”。自治机构的建制在澳门回归前已存在，乃前宗主国葡萄牙由本土引入，是quangos的一种。本文将从其法律地位主要是独立法人组织、内部管理架构、人员组成、经费来源、职权及监察几个大的范畴详细分析这些自治机构，并与香港类似组织作出比较。     

Revising Road Safety Policy: The Role of Systematic Evidence in Switzerland

In recent years, interest has grown in promoting and employing “evidence‐based policymaking.” This has been accompanied by an increase in available information about the performance of public policies. While existing research concludes that evidence about “what works” rarely prevails in democratic politics, it is inconclusive about which conditions affect the relevance of such evidence in decision‐making processes. This article aims first to clarify these conditions, and second, to present empirical findings from two case studies of road safety policy revision. The findings show how the creation and diffusion, as well as the political context, affect the role evidence plays in legislative policy revision in Switzerland.     

Mutual and Self Perceptions of Opposing Advocacy Coalitions: Devil Shift and Angel Shift in a German Policy Subsystem

In political conflicts, actors tend to assume that opponents behave maliciously. This phenomena is part of the “devil shift,” which was introduced in advocacy coalition framework research. We present a multivariate analysis of the perceptions of motives and actions of opposing coalitions in a political conflict and thereby analyze a major dimension of the “devil shift” and of its antonym “angel shift.” The conflict concerning the German infrastructure project Stuttgart 21 serves as a case study. We show that the radicalness of policy‐specific beliefs is the most important predictor for the intensity of mutual misperception in the researched conflict. The results further point to a more systematic inclusion of an actor's deep normative core beliefs in future analyses of distorted perception. Another central finding relates to the importance of the personal environment: actors in the subsystem share the same policy core beliefs with the majority of people in their personal environment.     

Policing the Bargain: Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny

Policymaking by coalition governments creates a classic principal‐agent problem. Coalitions are comprised of parties with divergent preferences who are forced to delegate important policymaking powers to individual cabinet ministers, thus raising the possibility that ministers will attempt to pursue policies favored by their own party at the expense of their coalition partners. What is going to keep ministers from attempting to move policy in directions they favor rather than sticking to the “coalition deal”? We argue that parties will make use of parliamentary scrutiny of “hostile” ministerial proposals to overcome the potential problems of delegation and enforce the coalition bargain. Statistical analysis of original data on government bills in Germany and the Netherlands supports this argument. Our findings suggest that parliaments play a central role in allowing multiparty governments to solve intracoalition conflicts.     

Controlling Federal Agencies: The Contingent Impact of External Controls on Worker Discretion and Productivity

ABSTRACT

Previous scholarship has investigated why legislatures sometimes choose to delegate policy choice to executive agencies, but there is little research on the consequences of the choice to delegate or not. Using a multiple principal-agent framework, this paper provides empirical evidence regarding the impact of legislative delegation and agency discretion on the work of U.S. government employees. Findings suggest that delegation directly reduces employee discretion only in client service agencies; its direct effects on employee productivity are more evident but varied. Legislative delegation is also associated with more executive political appointees, whose presence reduces both employee discretion and productivity. Whether employees with more discretion are more productive than those with less depends on their commitment to the job: employees who like their work more than their pay use their discretion to enhance productivity, while employees who like their pay more than their work use their discretion to reduce productivity.     

Optimal Central Banker Contracts and Common Agency

This paper considers the contracting approach to centralbanking in a simple common agency model. We suggest thatcentral banker contracts that do not consider the possibilityof more than one principal existing are incomplete contracts.Such incomplete contracts can be a poor form ofmonetary policy delegation under common agency. We develop amodel with two principals – society (government) and ageneric interest group, whose objective conflicts withsociety’s ex ante preferences by incorporating an inflationarybias. We determine when the government-offered orinterest-group-offered contract dominates the central banker’sdecision. The results largely depend on whether theinterest-group-offered contract is written in terms of outputor inflation.     

Competency Costs in Foreign Affairs: Presidential Performance in International Conflicts and Domestic Legislative Success, 1953–2001

Numerous prominent theories have relied on the concept of “audience costs” as a central causal mechanism in their arguments about international conflict, but scholars have had greater difficulty in demonstrating the efficacy and even the existence of such costs outside the bounds of game theory and the political psychology laboratory. We suggest that the audience costs argument focuses too narrowly on the likelihood that leaders will be removed from office by domestic constituencies for failing to make good on threats. Instead, we argue that scholars should ground these arguments on Alastair Smith's ( 1998 ) broader concept of “competency costs.” Our analysis of presidential legislative success from 1953 to 2001 demonstrates the existence of foreign policy competency costs by showing that public disapproval of presidential handling of militarized interstate disputes has a significant and substantial negative impact on the president's ability to move legislation on domestic issues through Congress.     

Why Have Policies Often Remained Symbolic? Understanding the Reasons for Decoupling between Policy and Practice

Why have policies that are unquestioningly accepted as appropriate remained symbolic? To answer the research question, I suggest two possible reasons for decoupling between policy and practice: the characteristics of normative pressure as “the weak enforcement mechanism of law” through the implementation stage and jurisdictions’ capacity to infuse the stories of success based on others’ use to their own day‐to‐day realities. In this article, I seek to reintroduce a seminal contribution of the early institutionalists by challenging the assumption that dimensions of adoption and implementation are synonymous or positively correlated. Empirical findings contribute to provide scholars and practitioners with a larger picture of policy diffusion and support the arguments by Nicholson‐Crotty and Carley that policy learning takes place based on policymakers’ assessment of both “policy actions” and “outcomes” in previously adopting jurisdictions.     

Legislative Control of Powers Delegated to the Executive: The Case of the EU

How can legislators derive the benefits of delegation without unduly empowering the executive? This article investigates how this dilemma is met in the European Union (EU) political system where executive power is delegated to the Commission. The argument is that the European member states have found a unique solution. They install committees of member state representatives to monitor the EU Commission, the so‐called comitology committees. However, the extent to which comitology committees are installed and their exact competence vary considerably across policy areas. This article uses a delegation perspective to understand this variation. An analysis of comitology provisions in 686 directives and regulations shows that institutional conflict and issue complexity, well‐known factors from the delegation literature, are important predictors of comitology control of the Commission. The findings support one of the two prevailing images of comitology—comitology as a control mechanism, not deliberative democracy.