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PDF
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Type:
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Conference Paper |
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Author:
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Vannoni, Matia; Ash, Elliott; Morelli, Massimo |
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Conference:
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Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop 6 |
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Location:
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Indiana University, Bloomington |
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Conf. Date:
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June 19-21, 2019 |
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Date:
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2019 |
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URI:
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https://hdl.handle.net/10535/10485
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Sector:
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General & Multiple Resources |
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Region:
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North America |
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Subject(s):
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Abstract:
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"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. Building on recent advances in computational linguistics, we provide a method for measuring discretion and delegation in legal texts, which automates the analysis and allows to study these two aspects on the same body of laws. 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 build a measure of bureaucratic discretion by looking at the level of legislative detail – namely the number of legally relevant provisions – for U.S. states, and find that this measure increases after the creation of an independent bureaucracy. This 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."
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