4 - Delegation and Discretion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Detailed legislation and judicial control over its execution are not sufficient to produce harmony between the governmental body which expresses the will of the state, and the governmental authority which executes that will. … The executive officers may or may not enforce the law as it was intended by the legislature. Judicial officers, in exercising control over such executive officers, may or may not take the same view of the law as did the legislature. No provision is thus made in the governmental organization for securing harmony between the expression and the execution of the will of the state.
– Frank Goodnow (1900, 97–98)We now consider the central institutional design problem for democratically sound public management, the delegation of legitimate policymaking authority to responsible officials. At its essence, this is an agency problem: Congress passes a law that is signed by the president. The coalition of actors supporting the law, or the enacting coalition, now wishes it to be implemented by an administrative agency, in keeping with the policy intent of the actors in that coalition. As in the agency problem arising between you and your doctor in Chapter 2, the problem may be one of effort, or it may be that the agent has different policy preferences from the enacting coalition. This particular conflict of interest lies at the core of this chapter.
The epigraph suggests that this conflict of interest is not resolved simply by specifying the actions that an administrative agency should take in the text of statutes.
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- The Political Economy of Public Sector Governance , pp. 78 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012