Delegation and Accountability

Abstract

Critics of legislative delegation to the bureaucracy worry that delegation diminishes electoral accountability and exacerbates legislative shirking. This paper provides equilibrium foundations for such concerns in a model in which legislators are heterogeneous in their policy preferences and bureaucrats have expertise concerning the policies that best serve the public. We further use our model to address debates concerning the welfare consequence of judicial enforcement of the nondelegation doctrine. We find that when the risk of special-interest capture of incumbent legislators is high and bureaucratic expertise is limited, a ban on delegation would benefit our model's representative voter; otherwise, the representative voter gains from delegation despite the fact that it can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians.