Delegation In Contemporary Democracies

Delegation is an ubiquitous social phenomenon linked to the growing differentiation of modern societies. Delegation is one of several different modes of organisation that exist to make collective action successful, but has been overlooked and under-researched. Using a rational choice institutional analysis and principal agent models, this book brings literature on delegation to bureaucracy, electorate to legislature to government within representative democracy together with literature on new forms of delegation such as non-majoritarian institutions, to provide a more complete and synthetic analysis of delegation in political systems. With a broad and comparative approach, this is an important volume for advanced students, researchers and professionals concerned with delegation in the areas of public policy, public administration and democratic theory.

Parliamentary democracy is the most common way of organizing delegation and accountability in contemporary democracies. Yet knowledge of this type of regime has been incomplete and often unsystematic. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies offers new conceptual clarity on the topic. Taking principal-agent theory as its framework, the work illustrates how a variety of apparently unrelated representation issues can now be understood. This procedure allows scholarship to move well beyond what have previously been cloudy and confusing debates aimed at defining the virtues and perils of parliamentarism. This new empirical investigation includes all seventeen West European parliamentary democracies. These countries are compared in a series of cross-national tables and figures, and seventeen country chapters provide a wealth of information on four discrete stages in the delegation process: delegation from voters to parliamentary representatives, delegation from parliament to the prime minister and cabinet, delegation within the cabinet, and delegation from cabinet ministers to civil servants. Each chapter illustrates how political parties serve as bonding instruments which align incentives and permit citizen control of the policy process. This is complemented by a consideration of external constraints, such as courts, central banks, corporatism, and the European Union, which can impinge on national-level democratic delegation. The concluding chapters go on to consider how well the problems of delegation and accountability are solved in these countries. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies provides an unprecedented guide to contemporary European parliamentary democracies. As democratic governance is transformed at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it illustrates the important challenges faced by the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe.

Written by leading specialists from Europe and the US, this unique text presents a unified view of political delegation, bringing together a wide range of literature to provide a complete and synthetic analysis of delegation in political systems.

Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are Max Kaase, Professor of Political Science, Vice President and Dean, School of Humanities and Social Science, International University Bremen, Germany; and Kenneth Newton, Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Southampton. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. Today, parliamentarism is the most common form of democratic government. Yet knowledge of this regime type has been incomplete and often unsystematic. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies offers new conceptual clarity on the topic. This book argues that representative democracies can be understood as chains of delegation and accountability between citizens and politicians. Under parliamentary democracy, this chain of delegation is simple but also long and indirect. Principal-agent theory helps us to understand the perils of democratic delegation, which include the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. Citizens in democratic states, therefore, need institutional mechanisms by which they can control their representatives. The most important such control mechanisms are on the one hand political parties and on the other external constraints such as courts, central banks, referendums, and supranational institutions such as those of the European Union. Traditionally, parliamentary democracies have relied heavily on political parties and presidential systems more on external constraints. This new empirical investigation includes all seventeen West European parliamentary democracies. These countries are compared in a series of cross-national tables and figures, and seventeen country chapters provide a wealth of information on four discrete stages in the delegation process: delegation from voters to parliamentary representatives, delegation from parliament to the prime minister and cabinet, delegation within the cabinet, and delegation from cabinet ministers to civil servants. Each chapter illustrates how political parties serve as bonding instruments which align incentives and permit citizen control of the policy process. This is complemented by a consideration of external constraints. The concluding chapters go on to consider how well the problems of delegation and accountability are solved in these countries. They show that political systems with cohesive and competitive parties and strong mechanisms of external constraint solve their democratic agency problems better than countries with weaker control mechanisms. But in many countries political parties are now weakening, and parliamentary systems face new democratic challenges. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies provides an unprecedented guide to contemporary European parliamentary democracies. As democratic governance is transformed at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it illustrates the important challenges faced by the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe.

Democracy enjoys unparalleled prestige at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a form of government. Some of the world's most prosperous nations are democracies, and an array of nations in Europe, Africa, and South America have adopted the system. This globalization has also met resistance and provoked concerns about international power exerted by institutions and elites that are beyond the control of existing democratic institutions. In this volume, leading scholars of democracy engage the key questions about how far and how fast democracy can spread, and how international agencies and international cooperation uneasily affect national democracies. At first glance, the efforts of intergovernmental organizations to intervene in a nation's governance seem anything but democratic to that nation. The contributors demonstrate why democracy has been so attractive and so successful, but are also candid about what limits it may reach, and why. Contributors are Lisa Anderson, Larry Diamond, Zachary Elkins, John R. Freeman, Brian J. Gaines, James H. Kuklinski, Peter F. Nardulli, Melissa A. Orlie, Buddy Peyton, Paul J. Quirk, Wendy Rahn, Bruce Russett, and Beth Simmons.

The transformation of Norway is a magnifying glass to processes of political change in European countries generally. In this book, a group of Norway`s most prominent political scientists closely analyzes the forces of change - ranging from the political apparatus, the mode of partisan mobilization, and the development of political trust to the new gender relations and the strains on the established elite consensus. This volume shows how Norway is an embodiment of the Nordic Model. Norwegian society and politics have attracted wide-spread interest for three interrelated reasons – a strikingly egalitarian and cooperative model for public-private relations, a stable and rich country on the outside of the European Union, and a notable engagement in moral policy areas globally. Now the model is in flux for domestic as well as external reasons. Rule by popular consent is in question, with a more fragile chain of governance and a slow erosion of mass parties. The model is transformed from below, through the changing democratic infrastructure, as well as from above, with privatization and market reform in the public sector. The focus is Norway, but the book is a comparative analysis of a paradigm case with relevance far beyond its own borders. This book was previously published as a special issue of the leading journal West European Politics.

A wide-ranging and provocative new interpretation of the increasingly important role of delegated public bodies in British political life.

In recent years there has been a considerable effort in some transnational organizations and institutions to confront a crisis of legitimacy by promising more accountability and openness. This volume takes as its central focus the role of accountability in democratic governance, and attempts to position a broad understanding of the notion of accountability within the overall context of the evolving political system of governance in Europe and in particular of the European Union. Bringing together new work by some of the leading scholars in the field, this volume considers the relationship between accountability and a wide range of other themes in European governance such as problems of representation, transparency, bureaucracy, and transnational relations. The volume also deals with the role of accountability in multi-level governance, and its relationship to both direct democracy and civil society. This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.