A case study of bureaucratic discretion: heterogeneous application of market entry regulation in Germany

All law is relatively coarse after its initial implementation as the legislature cannot foresee all contingencies that can arise in the actual application of the law. Therefore, decisions need to be made by street-level administrators as novel and particular circumstances arise. Economists have largely ignored the political science literature on street-level bureaucrats, such as policemen, welfare case managers, or regulatory agents. I present a case study in the context of market entry regulation in Germany. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that bureaucratic discretion exists, that is, administrative actions can be found on different ends of a decision space, and that its effects are potentially large. Administrators do not apply legislation in a uniform manner and we observe a systematically different application of rules across subnational jurisdictions.

Legislative Capacity & Administrative Power Under Divided Polarization

Conventional wisdom holds that party polarization leads to legislative gridlock, which in turn disables congressional oversight of agencies and thus erodes their constitutional legitimacy and democratic accountability. At the root of this argument is an empirical claim that higher levels of polarization materially reduce legislative productivity as measured by the number of laws passed or the number of issues on the legislative agenda addressed by those laws, both of which are negatively associated with party polarization. By focusing on the content of statutes passed rather than their number, this essay shows that in the era of party polarization and divided government, Congress has actually 1) enacted an ever growing volume of significant regulatory policy (packaged into fewer laws); 2) increasingly employed implementation designs intended to limit bureaucratic and presidential power; and 3) legislated regulatory policy substance in greater detail (reducing bureaucratic discretion) when relying on litigation and courts as a supplement or alternative to bureaucracy. This essay thereby complicates, both empirically and normatively, the relationship between Congress and administrative power in the era of party polarization and divided government.

Measuring Discretion and Delegation in Legislative Texts: Methods and Application to US States

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.

IMPLEMENTASI KEBIJAKAN DISKRESI PADA PELAYANAN KESEHATAN BADAN PENYELENGGARA JAMINAN KESEHATAN (BPJS)

Bureaucratic discretion in regional government as an effort to publish public service effectiveness in a state of urgency, which is a situation that emerges suddenly concerning the public interest that must be resolved quickly, where to resolve the issue, laws and regulations have not yet regulated it. Constraints In bureaucratic discretion in local government as one of the efforts in the effectiveness of public services is the insufficient cost due to excessive demand from the bureaucratic discretion program, policy participants who swell are not in accordance with the established plans, for example, participants who are not categorized as poor but ask to be classified as poor families and administrative services are not smooth because the bureaucratic discretion policy is more a spontaneous program from the local government. The ideal discretion model to overcome the problem of delegation of authority that occurs during diving This is to provide additional competency training in medical action to nurses with the aim that nurses are able to provide limited medical treatment services in accordance with the duties and authorities listed in the Nursing Act. In the development of public administration so many dynamics arise, starting from the role of separate public administration at all with the political world. The next understanding that then emerged was that administration was part of politics. The paradigm that arises is "when political ends administration begins". These understandings later led to many opinions both from scientists and practitioners to re-explore the essence of the science of public administration. Regional governments need to take legal action of discretion (freies ermessen) for those in remote or rural areas. The discretion is all activities that involve the process of policy making or decision making or action on its own initiative, not fixed on the provisions of the rules or laws with a variety of mature, contextual and accountable considerations

Bureaucrats at war: The resilient state in the Congo

Rebels often portray themselves as state-like to legitimize their rule, yet little is known about their on-the-ground relations with the administrators of state power—official bureaucrats. Drawing on internal armed group records from the Democratic Republic of Congo, this article argues that rebels’ state-like image is more than a simple veneer: Bureaucrats actively sustain state institutions and recruit rebel support during war. It develops a theory of the sources of leverage that bureaucrats use to negotiate with rebels. These interactions entail dual struggles to sustain the structures and symbols of state power and to shape the distribution of control over these institutions during war. On first front, bureaucrats can use their official status to market the symbols of state legitimacy—official certificates, codes, and paperwork—to rebels. On a second, to recruit protection for administrative posts. Pre-existing routines of noncompliance, like parallel taxes and sabotaged information, can use bureaucratic discretion and opacity to limit rebels’ takeover of state structures. This view from the ground demonstrates the real-time continuity of bureaucratic practice through daily paperwork and exchange during war. It contributes to research on rebel governance by illustrating new competitions for wartime statehood and illustrates the empirical practices of states seen as ‘juridical’ or weak.

Colonial Legacies

This chapter traces the lasting legacies of the opium monopolies. It links the infrastructures they established for restricting opium's commercial life to the region's post-World War II illicit opium economies and harshly punitive laws against drug trafficking. The chapter also utilizes a set of historical photographs to dwell on what alternative visions of state power and perspectives on vulnerability are rendered visible by better understanding the colonial history of opium prohibition. In addition, this chapter dwells on what has become invisible and taken for granted about the power of the state in the realm of opium and drug addiction. It concludes by addressing the analytical and normative implications to understanding the colonial administrative state in light of its fragilities and reinterpreting bureaucratic discretion as a creative act of problem solving.