Summary of Epstein and O'Halloran: Administrative procedures, information, and agency discretion -- Adam Brown, BYU Political Science

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Epstein and O'Halloran: Administrative procedures, information, and agency discretion

Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I even say who wrote them. If you have more recent summaries to add to this collection, send them my way I guess. Sorry for the ads; they cover the costs of keeping this online.

Epstein and O'Halloran. 1994. Administrative procedures, information, and agency discretion. AJPS 38:697-722.

Much of the game theory here was beyond me, but here's the general gist.

MAIN IDEA

"As [Congress's ex post] agenda control increases and problems of asymmetric information decline [i.e. Congress has better technical information], Congress will delegate a minimum level of ex ante discretionary authority to an agency, regardless of differences in policy preferences" (715).

In other words:

X1: Congress's ability to control agency actions ex post
X2: Congress's level of technical information about a policy's effects
Y: The amount of (ex ante) discretionary authority that Congress delegates to an agency
As X1 and X2 rise, Y falls (but it won't fall below a minimum level of necessary discretionary authority)

CONCERNS

I didn't really get the model/theory...
Same concern as with Bawn (1995): is there really a tradeoff between minimizing political uncertainty (control) and technical uncertainty (expertise)?

Research on similar subjects

De Figueiredo, Spiller, and Urbiztondo: An informational perspective on adminsitrative procedures (4 shared tags)
Bawn: Political control versus expertise (3 shared tags)
Huber and Lupia: Cabinet instability and delegation in parliamentary democracies (3 shared tags)
Kiewiet and McCubbins: The Logic of Delegation (3 shared tags)
McCubbins and Schwartz: Congressional oversight overlooked (3 shared tags)
Moe: Political institutions (3 shared tags)
Popkin: Public choice and rural development (3 shared tags)
Strom: Delegation and accountability in parliamentary democracies (3 shared tags)

Tags

Comparative Politics • Principal-Agent • Uncertainty • Information

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