Measuring Discretion and Delegation in Legislative Texts: Methods and Application to U.S. States

TY - JOUR

T1 - Measuring Discretion and Delegation in Legislative Texts: Methods and Application to U.S. States

AU - Vannoni, Matia

AU - Ash, Elliott

AU - Morelli, Massimo

N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by the European Research Council Advanced Grant [694583]. Publisher Copyright: Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021/1

Y1 - 2021/1

N2 - Bureaucratic discretion and executive delegation are central topics in political economy and political science. The previous empirical literature has measured discretion and delegation by manually coding large bodies of legislation. Drawing from computational linguistics, we provide an automated procedure for measuring discretion and delegation in legal texts to facilitate large-scale empirical analysis. The method uses information in syntactic parse trees to identify legally relevant provisions, as well as agents and delegated actions. We undertake two applications. First, we produce a measure of bureaucratic discretion by looking at the level of legislative detail for US states and find that this measure increases after reforms giving agencies more independence. This effect is consistent with an agency cost model, where a more independent bureaucracy requires more specific instructions (less discretion) to avoid bureaucratic drift. Second, we construct measures of delegation to governors in state legislation. Consistent with previous estimates using non-text metrics, we find that executive delegation increases under unified government.

AB - Bureaucratic discretion and executive delegation are central topics in political economy and political science. The previous empirical literature has measured discretion and delegation by manually coding large bodies of legislation. Drawing from computational linguistics, we provide an automated procedure for measuring discretion and delegation in legal texts to facilitate large-scale empirical analysis. The method uses information in syntactic parse trees to identify legally relevant provisions, as well as agents and delegated actions. We undertake two applications. First, we produce a measure of bureaucratic discretion by looking at the level of legislative detail for US states and find that this measure increases after reforms giving agencies more independence. This effect is consistent with an agency cost model, where a more independent bureaucracy requires more specific instructions (less discretion) to avoid bureaucratic drift. Second, we construct measures of delegation to governors in state legislation. Consistent with previous estimates using non-text metrics, we find that executive delegation increases under unified government.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85106824792&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1017/pan.2020.9

DO - 10.1017/pan.2020.9

M3 - Article

SN - 1047-1987

VL - 29

SP - 43

EP - 57

JO - POLITICAL ANALYSIS

JF - POLITICAL ANALYSIS

IS - 1

ER -