1 - LAWS, BUREAUCRATIC AUTONOMY, AND THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF DELEGATION

Summary

Representative democracy is often defended on the grounds that regular elections are the best way to align the incentives of policymakers with the desires of citizens. The normative argument is well rehearsed. Politicians make policy commitments, and electoral winners are given the chance to make good on these commitments through the laws they adopt. The laws, in turn, affect outcomes, and voters can react to these outcomes in the choices they make at election time. If policymakers fail to deliver on their promises, voters can use the ballot box to depose them. This power of voters over the policymakers, the story goes, keeps policymakers doing what the citizens want, which is a good thing.

Legislative statutes that politicians adopt provide the most important and definitive mechanism for determining policy on most issues. These laws define – or at least could in principle – the types of actions or behavior that may, must, or must not occur by particular groups or individuals in government and society. The language of these statutes therefore plays a fundamental role in the policymaking process.

The role of statutes in democratic processes, however, is somewhat amorphous. Ordinary citizens and attentive groups have only an indirect interest in the policies that statutes describe. Citizens, for example, rarely pay attention to policy details, and few citizens have ever read even a small part of an actual law. Instead, citizens care about the outcomes of policies.