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For fear of popular politics? Public attention and the delegation of authority to the United States executive branch
Author(s) -
Lavertu Stéphane
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
regulation and governance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.417
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1748-5991
pISSN - 1748-5983
DOI - 10.1111/rego.12061
Subject(s) - delegate , delegation , statute , statutory law , blame , gridlock , legislature , political science , politics , delegated authority , public administration , law , social psychology , psychology , computer science , traditional authority , programming language
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 U nited S tates 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.