National Styles of Regulatory Discretion: A Comparative Study of the British and Israeli Styles of Regulatory Discretion, 1948-2020

Very little attention has been paid to the how, when, and why countries vary in structuring and formalizing regulatory discretion. Addressing these issues, this paper examines how the British and Israeli legislatures shape and control regulatory discretion between 1948 and 2020 through the legislative language. Based on computational and manual text analysis of education legislation in the United Kingdom (UK) and Israel during 1948-2000, the findings illustrate the UK’s preference for controlling regulatory discretion by writing detailed laws (ex-ante control), as opposed to Israel’s preference for creating a complex bargaining environment that allows executive and legislative actors to control discretion (ex-post control). These findings suggest that consensual and adversarial spark different styles of discretion, and that further attention should be devoted to how types of politics drive regulatory expansion.