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Tag: administrative discretion

Bureaucrats as Policy-makers

Published by demetriodor on February 25, 2013

Everyone loves bitching about bureaucrats but few know what it is exactly that they do. Ed Page‘s new book ‘Policies without Politicians’ provides plenty of insights. As I mention at the end of this book review, everyone who theorizes or criticizes bureaucrats should read the book as a reality check. A shorter version of the review is forthcoming in West European Politics later this year. *** This book is about the making of decrees such as the Alcohol Disorder Zones in the UK, Salmon critical habitats in the US, Horse Medicines in the EU and Women’s Organizations in Sweden. If you suspect these issues are rather prosaic, you are not alone. And this is precisely the point. This book is about the making of policies in the absence of sustained attention by politicians. It is a study of how bureaucrats make rules when mostly left to their own devices. It is an exploration into the nature and limits of bureaucratic discretion to regulate our lives. The main conclusion, based on an analysis of 58 issues in six political systems, is that the freedom enjoyed by civil servants and their insulation from political control are in practice severely limited if not completely illusory, even when it comes to the relatively minor issues discussed in the book. Admittedly, this is a rather prosaic conclusion as well, but one that is comforting, timely andimportant. It is comforting to the extent that it dispels the popular myth of the faceless bureaucrats controlling our lives. It is timely because theories of policy-making and politico-administrative relations have…

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Discretion is Fractal

Published by demetriodor on February 1, 2013

Last week, I made a presentation at the Leiden University conference ‘Political Legitimacy and the Paradox of Regulation’ under the admittedly esoteric title ‘Discretion is Fractal’. Despite the title, my point is actually quite simple: one cannot continue to model, conceptualize and measure (administrative or legal) discretion as a linear phenomenon because of the nested structure of legal norms which exhibits self-similarity at different levels of observation. And, yes, this means that law is fractal, too. In the same way there is no definite answer to the question ‘how long is the coast of Britain‘, there can be no answer to the question which legal code provides for more discretion, unless a common yardstick and level of observation is used (which requires an analytic reconstruction of the structure of the legal norms). The presentation tries to unpack some of the implications of the fractal nature of legal norms and proposes an alternative strategy for measuring discretion. Here is a pdf of the presentation which I hope makes some sense on its own.