Delegation In The Regulatory State

. . . it is thanks to works like this one that we can make progress in the understanding of the phenomenon of independent regulatory authorities in Europe and elsewhere. Competition and Regulation in Network Industries When scholars and practitioners want to understand regulation in Europe, this book should be the first place they will turn. Combining innovative data, smart statistical analysis, and an in-depth knowledge of regulatory agencies and processes across a wide range of countries, Gilardi has produced an essential study of regulation and a stellar piece of scholarship. Charles Shipan, University of Michigan, US This is a crucial, important book for the study of independent regulatory agencies, an increasingly prevalent institution at the heart of the governance of markets. Gilardi offers an excellent quantitative analysis of the spread of such agencies. He presents a remarkable dataset and rigourously tests different explanations. His coverage is wide and his methods are first class. His conclusions will interest all scholars who work on the regulatory state. Mark Thatcher, London School of Economics, UK Regulatory agencies are an important aspect of the contemporary regulatory state. Drawing on an extensive body of comparative analysis, Fabrizio Gilardi s book provides a serious contribution that moves the literature forward. This book deserves to be considered carefully. Martin Lodge, London School of Economics, UK Fabrizio Gilardi s book is empirical political science of the regulatory state at its best. It has data of transnational breadth and depth that is diagnosed in a theoretically sophisticated way. The conclusion is that policymakers delegate in order to tighten the credibility of policy commitments and to tie the hands of future ministers who may have different preferences. This will become a building block for future scholarship on regulation and governance. John Braithwaite, Australian National University During the past 25 years, independent regulatory agencies have become widespread institutions for regulatory governance. This book studies how they have diffused across Europe and compares their formal independence in 17 countries and seven sectors. Through a series of quantitative analyses, it finds that governments tend to be more prone to delegate powers to independent regulators when they need to increase the credibility of their regulatory commitments and when they attempt to tie the hands of their successors. The institutional context also matters: political institutions that make policy change more difficult are functional equivalents of delegation. In addition to these factors, emulation has driven the diffusion of independent regulators, which have become socially valued institutions that help policymakers legitimize their actions, and may even have become taken for granted as the appropriate way to organize regulatory policies. Providing a broad comparison of independent regulatory agencies in Europe, Delegation in the Regulatory State will be of great interest to researchers and students in political science, public policy, and public administration.

The importance of administration in the EU has been growing progressively together with the development of EU competences and tasks in the internal market. From the original model of a Community leaving enforcement with the Member States, the EU has become a complex legal order where administrative tasks are spread among different actors, including EU institutions, EU agencies and national administrations. Within this complex administrative law landscape, agencies and their powers have been essentially 'upgraded'. This volume asks whether any such 'upgrade' is compatible with EU law and its principles. Exploring both the case law of the CJEU and the regulation relating to EU agencies, the volume asks a crucial question about the legitimacy of the ever-increasing role of agencies in the enforcement of EU law.

Tucker presents guiding principles for ensuring that central bankers and other unelected policymakers remain stewards of the common good.

This book argues that Congress's process for making law is as corrosive to the nation as unchecked deficit spending. David Schoenbrod shows that Congress and the president, instead of making the laws that govern us, generally give bureaucrats the power to make laws through agency regulations. Our elected "lawmakers" then take credit for proclaiming popular but inconsistent statutory goals and later blame the inevitable burdens and disappointments on the unelected bureaucrats. The 1970 Clean Air Act, for example, gave the Environmental Protection Agency the impossible task of making law that would satisfy both industry and environmentalists. Delegation allows Congress and the president to wield power by pressuring agency lawmakers in private, but shed responsibility by avoiding the need to personally support or oppose the laws, as they must in enacting laws themselves. Schoenbrod draws on his experience as an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and on studies of how delegation actually works to show that this practice produces a regulatory system so cumbersome that it cannot provide the protection that people need, so large that it needlessly stifles the economy, and so complex that it keeps the voters from knowing whom to hold accountable for the consequences. Contending that delegation is unnecessary and unconstitutional, Schoenbrod has written the first book that shows how, as a practical matter, delegation can be stopped.

This text provides an introduction to the ways in which five different disciplines have approached the study of business and government. It examines how business interacts with government in different parts of the world, including the United States, the EU, China, Japan and South America.

These changes, together with the general advance in the study of regulation, undoubtedly demand a re-evaluation of the theory of regulation, its methodologies and scope of application. This book is a perceptive investigation of recent evolutions in the manner and extent of governance through regulation. Scholars and students of comparative politics, public policy, regulation theory, institutional economics and political sociology will find it to be essential reading. It will also prove a valuable source of reference for those working or dealing with regulatory authorities and for business managers in private industries and services operating under a regulatory framework.