SUMMARY OF RESULTS

In this book, we have presented what we consider a null theory of policy making under separate powers. When legislators have the option of delegating authority to the executive, the division of policy-making authority will follow the natural fault lines of political advantage: Legislators will rationally choose to delegate in exactly those areas where the political advantages of doing so outweigh the costs. The balance of power across the branches will therefore depend on the efficacy of both delegation and legislative action, from one issue area to the next.

To capture this logic of national policy making, we constructed a formal model of policy formation in which committees and agencies both possess some degree of technical expertise. The median voter in Congress could choose to delegate to the executive or make the details of policy herself, and if any authority was delegated, the discretion accompanying this authority could be circumscribed by restrictive administrative procedures. From the model, we derived a series of propositions predicting that executive discretion should rise when legislative committees are outliers, fall under divided government, and rise when the issue area at hand is characterized by informational intensity or uncertainty.