Partisanship or Policy? Institutional Complexity and Delegation in the US Code

• In Event: Networks

Abstract

How do legislators allocate policymaking authority? Formal allocation of power is often framed as a preference-based problem. Under unified government, legislators should favor simple, efficient arrangments involving few implementing actors, while under divided government they should favor complex, overlapping decision-making structures that optimize oversight. Numerous studies have tested this basic framework in the context of enacted American legislation; however, these existing studies ignore the problem of policy context. Except in rare cases, most bills do not seek to solve an entirely new policy problem. Instead, bills usually modify existing legal rules and legislative enactments. As a result, without taking the existing legal context into account, we cannot be sure whether variation in institutional structure contained in a particular law is attributable to the political circumstances in which that law was passed or the preexisting language and legal norms it inherited.

To address this problem, I turn to the US Consolidated Code. Using a novel natural language processing- and network-based measurement strategy, I measure the complexity of the implementing arrangements contained in all Code sections and all yearly Code versions released from 1994-2016. This data structure allows me to implicitly control for policy context by modeling yearly changes in institutional structure, rather than the raw text of each piece of legislation. Though institutional complexity in the US Code increases during this period, I find that Code complexity increases no faster under divided government than under divided government than under unified government. Rather, the complexity of the implementing arrangements contained in each Code section are primarily driven by the policy area that section addresses. These findings both challenge existing work on formal institutional design and contribute to the burgeoning literature on ``submerged'' bipartisan collaboration over policy content in American politics.

Author

• Robert Shaffer, University of Pennsylvania